GIFT  OF 


Oc  amftergt  16ook0 


THE  LIFE  INDEED 


To  reach  the  ultimate,  angels'  law, 
Indulging  every  instinct  of  the  soul 
There  where  law,  life,  joy,  impulse  are  one  thing  ! 

BROWNING,  A  Death  in  the  Desert 


THE    LIFE    INDEED 

A    REVIEW,   IN    TERMS  OF  COMMON 

THINKING,  OF  THE  SCRIPTURE 

HISTORY   ISSUING  IN 

IMMORTALITY 


BY 

JOHN  FRANKLIN  GENUNG 

LATE    PROFESSOR    OF    LITERARY   AND    BIBEtCAL    INTERPRETATION 
IN    AMHERST    COLLEGE 


'I 


BOSTON 

MARSHALL  JONES  COMPANY 
1921 


1126 

Gi 


COPYRIGHT  -1921  -'BY 
MARSHALL    JONES    COMPANY 


THE    PLIMPTON    P R E S S • N O R W O O D  • M A S S • U  •  S  •  A 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

JOHN  FRANKLIN  GENUNG,  BY  John  Mason  Tyler  .     .  vii 

I.  ON  THE  LARGER  SCALE i 

I.    THE    SCALE    HITHERTO   PREVAILING         ...  8 
II.    ENLARGEMENT     DEMANDED   BY   EVOLUTIONARY 

SCIENCE 19 

III.     ENLARGEMENT    AS    MEASURED    BY    SCRIPTURE 

CONCEPTIONS 28 

II.  THE  TWILIGHT  STRATUM 37 

I.    THE    EMPIRE    OF    LAW   AND    FATE       ....  43 

II.     THE    ADVENT    OF   THE    SPIRIT         .....  54 

III.  EARLY    SPIRITUAL    REACTIONS 60 

IV.  THE    BURDEN    AND   THE    CRAVING        ....  66 

III.  NEARING  THE  FULNESS  OF  THE  TIME    ...  71 

I.    THE    END   OF   THE    COSMIC   TETHER  ....  77 

II.    ON   THE    FRONTIER   OF   ADULT   LIFE.        ...  83 

III.    THE    SOUL   OF    PROPHECY 89 

IV.  THE  LAW  OF  THE  SPIRIT  OF  LIFE     ....  103 

I.    THE    SECOND   BIRTH ll$ 

II.    THE   OUTWARD   CURRENT 132 

III.    THE    EVIDENCE    OF  THINGS    NOT   SEEN    .        .       .  1 54 

V.  THE  SUPREME  HISTORIC  VENTURE       ....  177 

I.    FROM  THE    EXCEEDING  HIGH   MOUNTAIN       .       .  196 

II.    THUS   IT   BECOMETH   US 221 

III.    TO  THIS    END   WAS   I   BORN 235 

IV.    THE   DECEASE   ACCOMPLISHED  AT    JERUSALEM.  249 


435162 


yi  CONTENTS 

CHAPTER 

VI.  NATURALIZING  THE  ACCOMPLISHED  FACT      .  267 

I.  EYE-WITNESSES    OF    HIS    MAJESTY       .  2 

II.  SINAI   VERSUS    SIGN       .... 

III.  THE   MIND    OF    SAINT   JOHN      ... 

IV.  THE  MIND    OF    SAINT    PAUL 

VII.  INVENTORY  OF  VITAL  VALUES     .... 

I.     THE    UNVEILED   MYSTERY 

II.     THOUGH    OUR   OUTWARD    MAN    PERISH      .        .        .332 
III.     WHY    STAND    YE    GAZING    UP    INTO    HEAVEN?       .       350 


JOHN   FRANKLIN    GENUNG 
JOHN   M.   TYLER 

ABOUT  the  middle  of  the  seventeenth  century  John 
Guenon,  a  Huguenot  born  near  La  Rochelle,  arrived 
in  New  York  and  became  one  of  the  first  settlers  at 
Flushing,  L.  I.  He  married  Margreta  Sneden,  a  native  of  Am- 
sterdam. Not  far  from  1700  another  Huguenot,  having  the 
name  of  Petell,  was  admitted  to  citizenship  at  Boston.  His 
daughter  married  Andrew  Nichols,  a  Scotchman  from  the 
north  of  Ireland.  Their  daughter  became  the  wife  of  Daniel 
Dye,  a  soldier  in  the  Revolution,  and  probably  of  Dutch  de- 
scent. The  Dyes  were  characterized  by  kindliness,  sense  of 
humor,  and  love  of  music;  Daniel  Dye's  wife  certainly  ought 
to  have  inherited  an  abundance  of  firmness  of  character. 

The  name  Guenon  had  by  this  time  been  corrupted  or 
changed,  as  was  usually  the  case  with  the  fine  old  French 
names,  into  Genung  or  Ganong.  Abram  Genung  married 
Martha  Dye,  and  their  son,  John  Franklin,  was  born  at  Wil- 
seyville  in  southern  New  York,  January  27,  1850.  Martha 
Dye  had  several  brothers  who  were  ministers.  Abram  Genung 
was  partly  a  farmer,  but  evidently  by  preference  a  carpenter- 
builder.  For  this  was  still  the  time  when  the  builder  was  also 
carpenter  and  architect  and  could  whittle  out  a  tall-spired 
New  England  church  or  a  fine  old  colonial  farmhouse,  worthy 
of  the  name  of  mansion.  He  had  vision  and  a  keen  sense  for 
proportion  and  values. 

The  child  John  and  his  twin  brother  grew  up  on  the  farm 
at  Wilseyville.  Here  was  the  early  environment  and  educa- 
tion which,  even  more  than  school  or  college,  made  the  farmer s' 
sons  of  that  generation  leaders  in  all  communities.  Every 
ploughing  probably  brought  up  a  new  stratum  of  stones  to  be 


viii  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

picked  up  by  the  boys.  The  farm  was  a  hive  of  all  sorts  of 
industry.  Here  the  boy  had  abundant  physical,  industrial, 
and  manual  training:  to  name  only  a  few  of  his  daily  exercises, 
nature  study  and  care  of  animals  were  unavoidable;  he  had 
his  share  in  the  responsibilities  of  the  family,  and  it  was  no 
small  one;  he  learned  firmness  and  self-reliance,  skill  and  in- 
genuity through  emergencies.  The  stranger,  though  a  friend, 
dares  not  invade  and  describe  the  family  life,  the  moral  and 
spiritual  atmosphere,  of  that  Huguenot,  Dutch,  Scotch-Irish 
household.  We  know  what  it  must  have  been;  John  had  time 
and  opportunity  to  think  for  himself.  Church  and  "little  red 
schoolhouse"  did  the  rest. 

In  1864  his  parents  "moved  to  Owego  for  the  sake  of  better 
school  advantages,"  •  -  as  Professor  Genung  says  in  the  "Vita" 
at  the  end  of  his  doc  tor 's  thesis.  Here  he  attended  an  acad- 
emy, a  great  institution  in  those  days,  usually  led  and  governed 
by  a  man  of  some  learning  and  more  power  and  vitality.  He 
made  such  use  of  his  time  and  opportunities  that  after  four 
years  he  was  admitted  to  the  junior  class  of  Union  College. 
It  was  a  day  of  comparatively  small  things  and  advantages  in 
all  our  colleges.  Their  material  equipment  was  very  meagre, 
the  recitation  rooms  were  bare  and  ugly,  the  library  was  practi- 
cally a  sealed  book  to  most  students.  The  professors  were 
pioneers  none  too  well  prepared  for  their  special  work;  but 
there  were  among  them  strong  men  well  aware  of  their  own 
limitations  and  resolved  that  students  standing  on  their 
shoulders  should  gain  a  wider  and  clearer  view  of  the  glories 
of  the  promised  land  of  learning. 

Among  these  was  one  of  whom  Professor  Genung  spoke 
often  with  especial  love  and  reverence.  Professor  Tayler 
Lewis  was  a  deep  and  broad  scholar.  In  spite  of  hindrances 
and  difficulties  he  had  gained  a  thorough  knowledge  of  Latin 
and  Greek,  Hebrew  and  Arabic,  and  was  a  profound  student 
of  the  Bible.  He  was  soaked  through  and  through  with  ori- 
ental literature,  thought  and  spirit.  In  1855,  when  the  theory 
of  evolution  had  been  forgotten,  not  to  be  revived  until  the 
publication  of  Mr.  Darwin's  "Origin  of  Species"  almost  fifteen 


JOHN  FRANKLIN  GENUNG  ix 

years  later,  Professor  Lewis  published  his  "Six  Days  of  Crea- 
tion," in  which  he  showed  that  the  generally  or  universally 
accepted  crude  conception  of  immediate  creation  of  species 
was  unscholarly  and  unbiblical  and  against  the  whole  spirit  of 
oriental  thought.  He  was  vigorously  denounced  by  a  few 
theologians  and  scientists,  but  was  generally  disregarded  and 
neglected,  the  usual  fate  of  a  pioneer  thinker  too  far  in  ad- 
vance of  his  age.  He  replied  vigorously  in  a  second  book,  for 
he  was  a  "mighty  man  of  valor,"  and  the  subject  dropped. 
Professor  Lewis  showed  the  hungry  young  Genung  the  "beauty 
that  was  Greece"  and  the  little  known  glory  and  depth  of 
oriental  thought,  and  taught  him  how  to  study  the  Bible  and 
literature.  All  this  was  but  a  small  part  of  what  the  old  hero, 
laying  off  the  harness,  did  for  his  young  pupil  and  disciple. 
He  might  well  have  said  with  Nestor:  "My  teaching  made 
thee  great." 

Mr.  Genung  completed  a  course  in  theology,  and  was  pastor 
of  a  church  from  1875  to  1878.  But  during  his  pastorate  his 
desire  to  study  and  to  prepare  for  teaching  grew  continually 
stronger.  In  October,  1878,  he  entered  the  University  of  Leip- 
zig, where  he  remained  for  three  years,  excepting  six  months' 
stay  in  London.  He  devoted  himself  to  English  literature. 
Biblical  study  was  not  neglected,  but  does  not  seem  to  have 
stood  first  in  his  thought  and  interest.  He  was  laying  founda- 
tions. His  doctor's  thesis  was  a  careful  and  thorough  study 
of  Tennyson's  "In  Memoriam."  He  returned  to  Amherst  Col- 
lege, taught  rhetoric,  and  wrote  a  text-book  on  the  subject 
which  has  been  used  throughout  the  country. 

What  attracted  him  most  was  not  so  much  the  beauty  of 
form  or  style  or  even  of  content  as  the  truthful  expression  of 
life.  His  work  on  "In  Memoriam"  is  a  study,  not  of  versifi- 
cation and  poetry,  but  of  a  soul  in  pain  and  struggle.  This 
was  the  expression  of  the  Huguenot,  Dutch,  and  Scotch  strains 
in  his  richly  blended  blood.  He  loved  beauty  of  expression, 
but  it  was  largely  the  beauty  of  exact,  definite  truthfulness. 
The  first  draft  of  any  manuscript  never  satisfied  him;  it  must 
be  written  again  and  rewritten.  Every  word  and  sentence  must 


x  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

be  true  to  his  thought  and  message,  though  the  rewriting  some- 
times worked  injury  to  his  style.  With  his  ancestry  he  could 
not  do  otherwise  than  "hold  his  rudder  true." 

From  the  same  source  came  his  steady,  firm  self-determina- 
tion and  his  dour  pertinacity.  He  was  a  prodigious  worker, 
doing  a  day's  task  before  most  of  us  had  left  our  beds,  and  still 
having  time  for  a  walk  before  breakfast.  His  sturdy  body 
seemed  incapable  of  weariness.  He  appeared  never  to  have  ex- 
perienced hurry,  worry,  or  fret.  His  college  duties  and  exer- 
cises were  never  neglected;  every  lecture  and  recitation  was 
most  carefully  prepared.  Every  theme  handed  to  him  was  read 
with  painstaking,  and  usually  with  pain,  and  the  supposed 
value  was  scrupulously  entered  in  a  large  book.  But  almost 
every  year  there  appeared  a  new  study,  of  close  thought  and 
rare  finish,  the  product  of  a  brain  which  seemed  to  grow  and 
flourish  and  work  while  other  men  slept. 

In  the  presence  of  meanness  or  falsehood  he  could  be  a  blaze 
of  indignation.  But  his  humanity  and  humanitarianism  were 
too  large  to  allow  him  to  devote  overmuch  anxiety  to  class- 
room discipline.  If  certain  "lewd  fellows  of  the  baser  sort" 
in  the  rear  seats  were  conspicuously  inattentive,  listless,  and 
heedless,  he  quietly  kept  on  "casting  pearls."  Once  in  an  un- 
usually vigorous  written  protest  he  characterized  some  pupils 
as  personae  non  gratae,  but  I  believe  that  they  remained 
through  the  course.  One  of  them  is  to-day  one  of  his  most 
ardent,  though  not  most  learned  admirers.  Like  some  of  the 
rest  of  us,  he  was  sometimes  or  often  imposed  upon,  but  it 
had  its  compensations. 

Soon  the  vitality  and  heart  of  the  man  began  to  draw  him 
from  the  books  of  modern  writers  to  the  wisdom  literature 
of  the  Bible,  the  grand  drama  of  Job,  the  shrewd  results  of 
ages  of  experience  crystallized  in  Proverbs,  and  the  ripe  ob- 
servation and  thought  of  Ecclesiastes ;  to  the  far  vision  of  the 
Prophets  and  the  companionship  of  the  Apostles  and  their 
Master.  This  was  his  real  lifework,  a  labor  of  love,  completed 
by  him  when  the  second  volume  of  his  "Guide  Book  to  the 
Biblical  Literature"  appeared  a  few  months  before  his  death. 


JOHN  FRANKLIN  GENUNG  xi 

He  had  no  great  enthusiasm  for  academic  textual  criticism, 
for  wild  guesses,  or  for  negative  results.  His  sane  common 
sense  and  feeling  of  values  had  taught  him  that  to  sift  merely 
the  chaff  out  of  a  grand  literature  was  hardly  worth  while.  He 
was  searching  for  wisdom  and  life,  and  he  either  found  it,  or, 
if  not,  he  did  not  publish  a  tome  to  inform  others  how  little 
he  had  discovered  or  appreciated  in  a  great  treasure  house. 
Scholars  and  plain  people  enjoyed  him.  His  research  was 
patient,  broad  and  deep,  original  and  individual,  like  that  of 
the  teacher  whose  mantle  had  fallen  on  his  shoulders.  He 
was  never  afraid  to  stand  alone. 

He  followed  the  gleam  with  intent  and  single  eye,  and  when 
pursuing  a  line  of  truth  he  had  little  interest  in  any  other  sub- 
ject. If  you  asked  him  about  Jeremiah,  you  might  sometimes 
be  surprised  to  receive  in  answer  a  flood  of  information  about 
the  early  Perizzites;  and  you  could  not  win  him  over  to  your 
interests.  At  that  time  his  mind  was  occupied  by  Perizzites. 
He  thought  hard  and  to  good  purpose. 

He  had  plenty  of  avocations.  He  was  editor  of  The  Anther st 
Graduates'  Quarterly  from  its  start.  He  loved  music  and  was 
always  a  member  of  two  or  more  orchestras.  On  this  subject 
he  was  ready  to  talk  gladly.  He  was  chairman  of  the  Town 
Planning  Board,  and  could  always  find  time  to  map  a  new 
street  or  design  a  bridge  or  a  building.  Here  too  he  showed 
the  same  sanity  and  accuracy  of  thought  that  characterized 
his  scholarship.  He  was  the  minister's  right-hand  man  in  the 
church.  When  the  Jones  Memorial  Library  was  founded,  he 
was  eager  to  help.  Some  of  the  choicest  sets  of  literature  in 
his  private  library  will  form  by  his  expressed  wish  the  nucleus 
of  a  literary  corner  in  its  reading  room.  He  had  as  many 
neighbors  as  the  Good  Samaritan.  He  once  said  to  a  friend: 
"When  I  die,  I  hope  some  one  will  say:  'Is  John  Genung  dead? 
It's  too  bad.'  "  His  hope  was  fulfilled  a  thousand  fold. 

After  his  death  there  was  found  among  his  papers  the 
manuscript  of  a  new  book  entitled  "The  Life  Indeed."  Here 
he  brought  together  the  results  of  all  his  explorations  in 
modern  and  ancient  literature,  in  science  as  well  as  in  the 


xii  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

Bible,  in  one  volume.  It  is  his  last  message,  crystallized  out 
of  study,  thought,  and  the  experience  of  trial,  struggle,  and 
success  —  out  of  a  broad  and  deep  life.  It  is  an  altogether 
fitting  last  word.  Life  and  life  indeed  was  his  specialty. 

There  are  some  men  whose  size  you  do  not  appreciate  until 
you  stand  close  to  them  and  measure  them  by  yourself.  Then 
you  recognize  their  stature  and  breadth  of  shoulders  and  know 
that  you  are  looking  at  a  big  man.  We  all  had  this  feeling 
when  we  met  our  friend  and  caught  a  glimpse  of  the  size  and 
symmetry  of  his  soul  and  heart.  The  Greeks  would  have 
spoken  of  his  sound  mind  and  inward  strength.  There  was 
nothing  of  Zarathustra's  "reversed  cripple"  about  John  Ge- 
nung.  Says  Professor  Huxley:  "That  man,  I  think,  has  had  a 
liberal  education  who  has  been  so  trained  in  youth  that  his 
body  is  the  ready  servant  of  his  will,  and  does  with  ease  and 
pleasure  all  the  work  that,  as  a  mechanism,  it  is  capable  of; 
whose  intellect  is  a  clear,  cold,  logic  engine,  with  all  its  parts 
of  equal  strength  and  in  smooth  working  order;  ready,  like  a 
steam-engine,  to  be  turned  to  any  kind  of  work,  and  spin  the 
gossamers  as  well  as  forge  the  anchors  of  the  mind;  whose 
mind  is  stored  with  the  great  and  fundamental  truths  of  Na- 
ture and  of  the  laws  of  her  operations;  one  who,  no  stunted 
ascetic,  is  full  of  life  and  fire,  but  whose  passions  are  trained 
to  come  to  heel  by  a  vigorous  will,  the  servant  of  a  tender  con- 
science ;  who  has  learned  to  love  all  beauty,  whether  of  Nature 
or  of  art,  to  hate  all  vileness,  and  to  respect  others  as  himself." 
Genung  pressed  towards  the  goal  of  a  liberal  education. 

After  all,  is  it  true  that  salvation  is  nothing  more  nor  less 
than  wholeness,  the  attainment  of  perfect  health;  that  health, 
haleness,  wholeness,  and  holiness  are  all  one  in  root-meaning? 
Did  we  all  rightly  as  well  as  instinctively  draw  close  to  Genung 
because  "virtue  went  out  of  him?"  Is  health  more  infectious 
or  contagious  than  disease?  And  we  cannot  help  noticing  that 
such  men  of  sound  sense  and  good  taste  as  Genung  and  Dr. 
Hitchcock  always  had  a  surprising  predilection  and  hearty 
liking  for  sinners  —  such  apparently  was  also  the  mind  of  the 
Master.  And  sinners  loved  them.  Such  abounding,  overflow- 


JOHN  FRANKLIN  GENUNG  xiii 

ing,  health-giving  lives  are  the  irrefutable  argument  for  im- 
mortality. The  "narrow  stream  of  death"  is  altogether  too 
shallow  to  overwhelm  a  great  soul.  Try  as  hard  as  we  will, 
it  is  impossible  to  imagine  them  as  dead.  They  heard  the 
sunset  gun,  rested  a  little  on  their  arms,  but  at  sunrise  were 
again  marching  on  refreshed  and  renewed  to  the  service  and 
victories  of  a  brighter  day. 


I 

ON   THE   LARGER   SCALE 

BY   WHAT   MEASUREMENT   ALONE   AN   ETERNAL   OUTLOOK 
OF   LIFE   IS   ATTAINABLE 

I.  THE  SCALE  HITHERTO  PREVAILING 

II.  ENLARGEMENT  DEMANDED  BY  EVOLUTIONARY  SCIENCE 

III.  ENLARGEMENT  AS  MEASURED  BY  SCRIPTURE  CONCEPTIONS 


t 


THE   LIFE    INDEED 

I 
ON   THE   LARGER   SCALE 

TO  believe  in  immortality  is  one  thing/'  says  Robert 
Louis  Stevenson,  "but  it  is  first  needful  to  believe 
in  life."  These  words,  more  far-reaching  than 
their  simplicity  betokens,  contain  the  key  to  the  study  on 
which  we  are  now  entering.  To  believe  in  immortality,  — 
late  as  our  day  of  the  world  is,  and  full  of  knowledge,  men 
are  still  trying  as  desperately  and  dimly  as  ever  to  do  this. 
But  they  are  so  constituted  that  belief  cannot  come  by  trying 
to  believe;  cannot  be  made  out  of  whole  cloth,  cannot  be 
made  at  all.  It  is  a  thing  wholly  beyond  the  power  of 
councils  or  sages  or  churches  or  creeds  to  engender.  It 
must,  like  knowledge,  like  science,  be  built  on  valid  grounds 
and  verifiable  data;  must  in  the  end  be  not  only  desirable 
but  reasonable. 

Where  then  shall  the  grounds  and  data  of  a  belief  in 
immortality  come  from?  There  has  been  no  lack  of  strenuous 
search.  Nature  and  mind,  the  secrets  of  matter  and  the 
underworld  of  human  consciousness,  have  been  ransacked 
for  them;  thus  far  it  would  seem,  if  we  may  judge  by  the 
still  prevailing  doubt,  to  little  conclusive  purpose.  The  great 
majority  of  open-eyed  inquirers  are  still  confessing,  "We 
have  but  faith,  we  cannot  know";  as  if  this  were  about  equiv- 
alent to  giving  up  the  case.  But  somehow  the  case  does  not 
consent  to  be  put  out  of  court.  It  still  has  secondary  rights 
to  be  heard,  if  not  the  main  one.  There  yet  remains  the 
question  how  much  it  means  to  have  faith,  as  so  many  have, 
even  against  the  apparent  grounds  of  faith;  and  more  stimu- 
lating still,  the  question,  If  we  cannot  know  this,  this  direct 

3 


4  r HE  LIFE  INDEED 

fact  of  immortality,  what  can  we  know?  And  I  think  it  will 
turn  out  that  there  is  more  knowledge  available,  and  knowl- 
edge of  greater  value,  than  we  have  been  aware  of.  The 
century's  austere  spirit  of  doubt,  like  a  lion  in  the  way,  has 
scared  us;  so  that  we  were  too  timid  to  recognize,  calmly 
and  wisely,  the  data  that  are  in  plain  sight  before  us. 
•A*  The  proposition  to  which  this  study  is  committed  is,  that 
whatever  the  ultimate  source  of  these  grounds  and  data  of 
immortality,  they  can  be  found  nowhere  except  in  life  itself, 
in  the  normal  and  rounded  life  of  manhood,  what  I  here  call 
the  Life  Indeed.  Even  if  they  come  by  what  is  termed 
revelation,  they  must  needs  come  not  by  portent  and  miracle, 
not  by  some  unmotived  irruption  from  without,  but  by  the 
way  of  our  common  human  existence.  They  must  come  in 
response  to  an  appetency  and  an  assimilative  power  already 
there,  already  native  to  manhood,  rather  than  by  something 
extra-human  superinduced.  This  is  but  another  way  of  saying 
what  Emerson  said  years  ago,  that  immortality  will  come  to 
such  as  are  fit  for  it,  and  that  he  who  would  be  a  great 
soul  in  future  must  be  a  great  soul  now.  But  this  does  not 
close  the  case;  it  only  opens  the  more  vital  question,  What 
is  it  then  to  be  a  great  soul,  to  be  fit  for  immortality? 
Is  it  in  man  at  all,  as  we  can  compass  his  life's  worth  and 
wealth,  to  be  a  candidate  for  so  high  a  destiny?  This  throws 
us  back  from  the  grave  and  its  sequel  to  the  arena  of  char- 
acter and  action;  it  calls  on  us  to  raise  manhood  life  to  its 
highest  power;  in  other  words,  it  stipulates,  as  I  said  to  begin 
with,  that  before  we  reach  the  point  where  we  can  believe 
in  immortality  we  learn  to  believe  in  life. 

If  our  study  were  to  depend  on  voluminous  reading,  there 
is  no  dearth  of  material.  The  subject,  in  various  stages  and 
aspects,  is  just  now  beyond  most  others,  as  we  say,  in  the  air. 
For  the  latest  views,  kept  supposedly  up  to  date,  one  need 
only  instance  the  Ingersoll  Lectureship;  so  I  need  not  ask 
here  what  Professor  Ostwald  thinks  about  it,  and  Professor 
Osier,  and  Professor  James,  and  Professor  Royce,  and  Pro- 
fessor Wheeler,  and  John  Fiske,  and  Doctor  Gordon.  Nor 


ON   THE  LARGER   SCALE  5 

would  I  here  do  less  than  pay  them  all  the  tribute  of  heartiest 
honor,  as  men  able  and  authoritative,  who  have  enriched  our 
theme  from  many  sides.  It  is  forever  too  late,  with  their 
weighty  contributions  in  mind,  to  re-echo  that  cheap  sneer 
of  Omar  Khayyam: 

Myself  when  young  did  eagerly  frequent 
Doctor   and   Saint,  and   heard   great   argument 

About  it  and  about:  but  evermore 
Came  out  by  the  same  door  where  in  I  went. 

And  yet  —  can  we  say  that  any  of  them  have  really,  as  the 
old  phrase  is,  touched  the  spot?  As  these  little  books  have 
come  out  year  by  year,  each  from  its  point  of  view  so  frankly 
admitting  that  we  know  but  in  part,  I  have  caught  myself 
wondering  when,  if  at  all,  the  Ingersoll  Lectureship  was  going 
to  raise  the  question,  What  does  the  Bible  say  about  it?  For 
it  seems  to  me  that  the  Bible,  rightly  weighed  and  digested, 
more  nearly  touches  the  spot  than  any  other  book  or  science 
or  philosophy  that  has  been  or  can  be  written;  that  all  that 
is  true  in  these  others  gets  its  light  from  the  Bible  way  of 
looking  at  things;  and  that  the  gaps  and  holes  in  these 
others  are  filled  and  rounded  out  there.  I  am  not  saying 
this  of  the  Bible,  however,  according  to  our  conventional  way 
of  regarding  it;  though  I  raise  no  objection  to  this.  We 
have  got  so  used  to  reading  it  in  a  Sunday  frame  of  mind, 
or  only  as  fitting  it  mentally  to  some  theological  system,  that 
we  were  well  nigh  color  blind  to  its  natural  and  cosmic 
significance.  In  spite  of  the  analysis  and  criticism  that  we 
have  laid  out  upon  it,  we  are  still  reading  it  according  to 
a  long  stereotyped  formula.  And  so  doing  we  are  getting 
even  as  Bible  scholars  behind  the  age.  With  minds  wonder- 
fully enlarged  and  quickened  in  other  lines,  we  are  still  letting 
our  Bible  thoughts  jog  along  in  the  same  pld  pious  and  petty 
harness.  We  are  as  yet  very  imperfectly  aware  how  pro- 
foundly the  Bible  history  and  thoughts  are  changed,  as  we  turn 
upon  them  conceptions  which  have  advanced,  so  to  say,  from 
Ptolemaic  to  Copernican. 

Here  is  where  the  Bible  view  that  I  wish  now  to  present 


6  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

comes  in.  I  want  to  see  how  it  squares  with  our  common- 
day  conceptions  and  terms;  with  the  ideas  that  are  potent 
to-day  to  move  us:  how  it  identifies  itself  with  what  nature 
and  human  nature  are  revealing  to  us  otherwise.  The  Bible 
has  been  ignored  hitherto,  I  apprehend,  in  the  interest  of 
science;  which  supposedly  could  not  mix  with  revelation  and 
must  therefore  be  its  foe.  Well,  my  contention  is  that  this  is 
a  false  position.  I  maintain  that  the  Bible  itself  is  in  the 
interest  of  science,  and  only  so;  that  on  the  subject  we  have 
in  hand,  saying  now  nothing  of  its  other  involvements,  it  is 
the  one  truly  scientific  treatment  we  have.  We  may  call  it, 
in  the  most  exacting  and  authentic  sense,  the  world's  sufficing 
text-book  of  immortality. 

Note  then  that  this  text-book  of  ours  bears  one  plain  mark 
of  the  scientific  attitude:  it  takes  its  stand  on  the  ground  not 
of  theories  and  metaphysical  speculations,  but  of  actual  fact. 
Its  method  is  historical.  It  records,  with  clear  indication  of 
the  time  and  the  causes  and  the  agency,  the  fact  that  life  and 
immortality  were  brought  to  light  in  this  world.  That  great 
event  took  place  comparatively  late  in  its  chronicled  account. 
We  can  look  back  from  it  therefore  over  a  period  wherein  pre- 
sumably life  and  immortality  were  not  yet  in  light  but  in 
gloom,  or  perhaps  in  a  gradually  brightening  twilight.  Look- 
ing back,  then,  as  we  have  such  warrant,  we  find  it  even  so. 
We  come  upon  a  long  stretch  of  time  in  which  no  word  about 
a  life  beyond  this  life  is  spoken,  and  in  which  the  idea  of  im- 
mortality, even  if  it  exists,  has  no  motive  power  at  all.  Then 
later  we  hear  the  wisest  and  piousest  man  in  the  world  asking 
doubtfully,  "If  a  man  die,  shall  he  live  again?"  Later  still 
we  hear  another  wise  man,  puzzled  with  the  knotty  problems 
of  being,  almost  indignantly  maintaining  that  we  can  know 
nothing  about  it.  And  yet  in  spite  of  this  depth  of  agnosticism 
there  comes  later  the  announceent  that  life  and  immortality 
are  revealed,  that  they  lie  clear  and  illuminate  before  us. 
Here  evidently  is  the  record  of  a  great  revolution  in  knowledge 
and  insight,  amounting  to  all  the  difference  between  darkness 
and  light.  The  Bible  history  is  a  history  which  sounds  a  dim 


ON   THE  LARGER   SCALE  7 

and  perilous  way  through  men's  progressive  thoughts  and 
ideals,  and  issues  in  immortality. 

Note  one  or  two  things  further.  Our  text-book  does  not 
say  that  in  those  earlier  times,  and  for  those  earlier  people, 
immortality  did  not  yet  exist.  It  raises  no  question  of  when 
it  began  to  be  a  fact,  but  simply  of  when  it  began  to  be  seen, 
when  it  came  to  light.  Note  again,  that  when  immortality 
first  came  to  light,  then  first  life  itself  came  to  light;  the  two 
came  into  the  field  of  vision  together.  It  would  seem  then 
that  in  those  primal  ages  of  gloom  and  twilight  men  did  not 
know  fully  how  to  live.  Like  the  animals,  in  some  degree, 
they  were  nourishing  a  blind  life  within  the  brain,  hardly 
aware  what  it  all  meant.  Here  then  is  a  momentous  history  to 
trace:  the  long  slow  development  whereby  manhood  was  get- 
ting its  eyes  open  to  see  a  destiny  which  had  always  existed; 
the  passing  from  blindness,  perhaps  through  dimness  and  fit- 
ful glimmers,  to  full  eyesight,  from  midnight  to  the  light  of 
day.  Here  we  are  shown  what  is  the  soul's  plight  before  the 
light  has  come;  what  its  joy  and  emancipation  after;  and  how 
that  immortality  which  was  revealed  along  with  life  looks  in 
the  diffused  daylight.  Such  a  course  of  history,  which  in  fact 
but  represents  the  matter-of-fact  scripture  current,  kindles  the 
imagination  by  the  splendor  of  its  promise;  it  is  close  yoke- 
fellow to  poetry;  but  does  it  not  also  look  sane  and  interre- 
lated and  reasonable? 

We  are  going  now  to  trace  it;  very  badly  and  condensedly, 
as  must  needs  be  in  our  space;  but  first  we  must  determine 
the  scale  on  which  our  minds  shall  work.  On  a  small  scale 
we  can  make  only  small  measurements  and  get  a  petty  out- 
look. A  pint-cup  is  no  fitting  instrument  to  judge  an  ocean 
by.  Our  subject  comes  into  the  light  of  self -evidencing  truth 
only  as  we  approach  it  on  the  larger  scale.  One  reason,  a 
main  reason  I  think,  why  men's  endeavor  to  believe  in  immor- 
tality is  beset  by  confusion  and  conjecture,  is  that  they  are 
looking  for  the  wrong  thing,  a  thing  that  even  if  it  exists  is 
not  scientifically  worthy  to  enlist  a  soul's  supreme  energies. 
It  is  a  mercy,  perhaps,  that  their  eyes  are  holden  until  they 


8  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

are  ready  to  see  things  commensurate  with  the  dignity  of  their 
nature. 


I.      THE    SCALE    HITHERTO    PREVAILING 

To  realize  how  this  is,  let  us  take  a  look  at  the  scale  of  in- 
quiry and  estimate  that  has  prevailed  in  men's  minds  hither- 
to, both  in  the  secular  and  the  biblical  standard  of  view. 

"Where  wert  thou,  brother,  those  four  days?"  is  the  ques- 
tion which  the  nineteenth  century  Laureate,  acting  spokesman 
of  a  whole  curious  humanity,  puts  to  Lazarus  of  Bethany,  that 
excepted  mortal  who,  by  scripture  account,  having  passed  the 
gates  of  death  and  well  on  into  the  region  of  corruption  beyond, 
came  back  to  resume  this  bodily  existence.  A  question  emi- 
nently natural,  and  on  the  scale  of  ideas  hitherto  prevailing, 
most  momentous.  The  poet  who  phrased  it  is  half  resentful 
at  Lazarus,  or  his  historian,  for  leaving  the  answer  unrecorded; 
such  answer  would,  he  thinks,  so  laudably  crown  our  hard-won 
discoveries  in  the  mysteries  of  being,  by  telling  what  it  is  to 
die. 

What  it  is  to  die,  and  its  correlate,  what  it  is  to  survive 
death,  —  in  this  strain  of  inquiry  it  is  that  the  world's  search 
for  immortality  centres.  It  is  the  kind  of  speculation  and  con- 
jecture that  rises  first  out  of  the  phenomena  we  see,  and  that 
takes  most  immediate  hold  of  actual  fact.  If  only  this  were 
known,  if  only  we  could  push  exploration  four  days,  or  one 
hour,  beyond  the  last  lapsing  breath,  what  an  assured  basis 
we  should  have,  it  would  seem,  for  all  the  rest.  At  this  point 
it  is  that  knowledge  ceases;  and  at  this  point,  it  is  reasonable 
to  assume,  the  broken  thread  should  be  joined  again.  In  the 
quest  for  evidence  of  survival,  what  procedure  so  obviously 
fitting  as  to  set  up  our  exploring  apparatus  at  the  place  where 
the  clue  was  lost?  And  with  such  presupposition  it  is  not  un- 
reasonable to  suppose  that  the  Bible,  if  its  claim  to  revelation 
is  authentic,  if  indeed  it  would  save  itself  from  discredit  by 
dealing  with  visible  facts  instead  of  religous  fancies,  should 
on  this  matter  preeminently  be  luminous  and  outspoken. 


ON   THE  LARGER   SCALE  9 

Yet  here  the  Bible  is  as  silent  and  apparently  as  helpless  as 
is  our  baffled  experience  itself.  To  the  inquiry  rising  so  spon- 
taneously out  of  this  miracle  at  Bethany  no  word  of  reply  is 
vouchsafed. 

Behold  a  man  raised  up  by  Christ! 

The  rest  remaineth  unreveal'd; 

He    told   it   not;    or   something   seal'd 
The  lips  of  that  Evangelist. 

Nor  does  the  Bible  elsewhere  tell  us,  with  any  authoritative 
or  realistic  clearness,  what  it  is  to  die.  Such  information  may 
have  been  left  to  biological  science,  which  would  seem  to  have 
legitimate  charge  of  such  things;  at  any  rate,  it  does  not  seem 
to  belong  to  the  distinctive  range  of  scripture  disclosure.  In 
its  large  trend  the  Bible  virtually  ignores  the  tomb;  and  herein 
it  is  in  great  contrast  to  other  so-called  sacred  books.  It  is 
in  no  sense  a  rival,  for  instance,  of  that  portentous  Egyptian 
Book  of  the  Dead,  which  in  its  day  wrought  to  transform  a 
nation's  religion  into  a  huge  funeral  service,  and  made  a 
whole  country-side  one  vast  mausoleum.  Brought  to  confront 
the  mystery  of  man's  exit  from  this  material  life,  it  merely  has 
at  command  the  language  that  human  tongues  have  moulded 
for  it,  no  more.  The  dust  returns  to  earth  as  it  was;  the 
spirit  to  God  who  gave  it.  That  is  its  terse  summary  of  things, 
and  that  is  ours.  No  voice  from  heaven  is  needed  to  tell  us 
that;  nor  is  there  prophetic  demonstration  or  oracle  to  tell  us 
more. 

Before  we  jump  to  the  conclusion,  however,  that  we  have 
here  uncovered  a  lame  spot  in  divine  revelation,  or  take  up 
with  the  prevailing  scientific  contempt  for  the  scriptural  view 
of  things,  it  may  be  worth  while  to  ask  if  this  silence  itself  may 
not  have  a  meaning.  There  are  cases  wherein  an  omission, 
by  the  very  conspicuousness  of  the  absence  it  creates,  is  elo- 
quent as  an  argumentum  e  silentio.  And  this,  I  think,  is  the 
plain  state  of  the  case  here.  The  Bible  makes  so  little  of 
physical  death  and  its  sequel,  in  spite  of  men's  age-long  bond- 
age from  fear  of  death,  not  because  it  has  met  a  mystery 
too  hard  for  it,  but  because  on  its  scale  of  disclosure  these  are 


io  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

of  too  little  consequence  to  pay  the  revealing.  All  that  needs 
to  be  known  of  them  can  be  left  to  common  observation,  or  to 
a  lower  department  of  science.  Its  business  is  with  matters  of 
real  moment  for  life.  It  teaches  how  to  live  rather  than  how 
to  die.  In  pursuance  of  this  object  its  range  of  conceptions 
shapes  itself  into  a  spacious  map  of  being  in  which,  when  all 
vital  elements  are  reckoned,  death  is  seen  as  a  mere  incident, 
nay  rather  as  actually  abolished;  in  which  therefore  the  doubt- 
ful and  troubled  interrogation  of  death,  as  if  this  were  of  any 
essential  account  in  the  large  destiny  of  man,  is  needless  and 
supererogatory. 

Here  at  the  outset  of  our  study,  then,  we  note  a  difference 
amounting  to  contrast,  between  the  world's  prevailing  sense 
of  unseen  values  and  the  Bible's.  On  the  one  side  the  event  of 
physical  death  bulks  relatively  so  large  in  the  sum  of  being 
that  the  answer  to  the  question  what  region  it  opens,  if  any, 
seems  the  indispensable  step  to  the  discovery  of  immortality. 
On  the  other  side,  that  same  event  counts  for  so  little  that  the 
question  seems  never  to  have  occurred  at  all.  It  is  evidently 
regarded  as  of  no  essential  significance  whatever  where  Laz- 
arus was  those  four  days.  A  disparity  of  estimate  this,  very 
important  to  note  and  weigh.  Views  so  contradictory  cannot 
both,  it  would  seem,  be  valid.  We  are  concerned  to  know 
which  is  right,  and  especially  which  is  more  worthy  of  our 
manhood  and  of  the  true  dignity  of  being. 

Without  dwelling  longer  on  this  contrast,  however,  a  few 
minutes'  attention  is  due,  before  we  enter  on  the  scripture  con- 
ception, to  the  involvements  of  the  estimate  of  things  hitherto 
prevailing,  which  is  trying,  so  to  say,  to  get  a  survey  of  eternal 
life  by  peeping  beyond  the  gates  of  physical  death. 

We  may  have  discredited  spiritualism  and  occultism;  may 
be  wholly  skeptical  of  anything  authentic  coming  from  psy- 
chical research;  and  as  a  matter  of  fact  there  is,  and  seems 
always  likely  to  be,  as  much  doubt  as  belief  concerning  these 
things.  The  difficulties  are  so  enormous,  the  chances  of  fraud 
and  self-deception  are  such  a  constant  besetment,  that  the 
instinct  of  straightforward  minds  is  strongly  against  the  whole 


ON   THE  LARGER   SCALE  11 

uncanny  matter.  Those  who  would  treat  it  scientifically,  in 
order  to  see  what  there  is  or  is  not  in  it,  have  to  work  against 
great  odds  of  sentiment.  All  the  same,  men's  thoughts  of  the 
unseen  future  are  in  general  keyed  to  that  scale.  If  it  could 
be  proved  that  spiritualism  and  psychic  research  achieve  au- 
thentic results,  men  would  be  ready  to  accept  them,  and  for 
the  most  part  men  are  not  ready  to  look  for  a  solution  in 
any  other  way.  This  is  natural,  perhaps;  I  am  not  blaming 
them.  I  am  not  saying  that  something  may  not  in  time  come 
of  it;  or  even  that  the  eventual  result  of  the  present  study 
may  not,  on  its  larger  scale,  leave  us  in  much  the  same  atti- 
tude. On  any  quest  for  immortality,  however,  conducted  by 
mere  scientific  observation  we  are  committed,  of  necessity,  to 
what  may  be  called  a  peep-hole  revelation.  No  device  of 
physics,  no  apparatus  of  biology,  has  a  lens  large  enough  or 
fine  enough  for  more.  By  a  natural  assumption  souls  that 
have  passed  beyond  death  are  supposedly  somewhere  in  the 
universe  now;  somewhere,  and  in  some  questionable  shape, 
their  once  awaited  future  has  become  an  eternal  present. 
What  so  reasonable,  if  this  is  so,  as  to  try  to  find  them  and 
observe  how  they  fare?  This  is  the  tacit  idea  which  not  only 
every  spiritualist,  but  every  one  who  has  the  spiritualist's 
calibre,  carries  about  with  him.  Browning's  Mr.  Sludge  the 
Medium,  fraud  though  he  is,  can  presuppose  so  much  in  his 
accuser: 

Go  back  to  the  beginning,  —  the  first  fact 

We're  taught  is,  there's  a  world  beside  this  world, 

With  spirits,  not  mankind,  for  tenantry; 

That  much  within  that  world  once  sojourned  here, 

That  all  upon  this  world  will  visit  there, 

And  therefore  that  we,  bodily  here  below, 

Must  have  exactly  such  an  interest 

In  learning  what  may  be  the  ways  o'  the  world 

Above  us,  as  the  disembodied  folk 

Have  (by  all  analogic  likelihood) 

In  watching  how  things  go  in  the  old  home 

With  us,  their  sons,  successors,  and  what  not. 

Oh,  yes,  with  added  powers  probably, 

Fit  for  the  novel  state,  —  old  loves  grown  pure, 

Old  interests  understood  aright,  — they  watch! 


12  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

Eyes  to  see,  ears  to  hear,  and  hands  to  help, 
Proportionate  to  advancement:  they're  ahead, 
That's  all  —  do  what  we  do,  but  noblier  done. 

A  natural  enough  conception,  to  be  sure;  though  of  course 
all  this  must  needs  be,  on  the  scale  of  estimate  it  connotes,  an 
external,  prying,  spectacular  affair.  It  is  as  if  the  dead  had 
been  transferred  to  a  mysterious  museum  or  aquarium,  and 
we  who  are  left  could  observe  them  only  as  uncouth  figures 
moving  vaguely  about  in  an  element  which,  though  we  should 
win  to  the  sight  of  it,  could  yield  nothing  of  its  essential  na- 
ture, its  real  inwardness.  It  is  very  little,  after  all,  that  we 
could  get,  if  we  got  the  utmost  we  seek. 

Then  there  is  the  whole  sorry  business  of  opening  communi- 
cation with  the  dead.  I  must  not  go  into  this  at  all;  I  could 
not  without  having  to  go  too  far.  Call  it  by  the  most  dignified 
name  you  can,  call  it  science,  call  it  psychic  research,  call  it 
theosophy;  and  what  is  the  real  purport  of  it?  I  have  no 
desire  to  belittle  it?  any  further  than  it  belittles  itself;  I  wish 
merely,  as  the  phrase  is,  to  size  it  up.  And  this  we  may  grate- 
fully say  of  psychism :  if  it  has  not  revealed  anything  authentic 
or  illuminating  about  the  dead,  it  is  in  the  way  of  revealing 
something  about  the  living;  of  exploring  many  secrets  of  our 
abysmal  personality,  many  strange  mysteries  of  our  subcon- 
scious selves.  It  forces  us  back  after  all,  you  see,  upon  the 
study  of  life;  it  cannot  help  this  in  the  long  run.  To  believe 
in  immortality  is  one  thing,  as  Stevenson  has  already  told  us, 
but  it  is  first  needful  to  believe  in  life. 

What  stratum  of  life,  then,  shall  we  address  ourselves  to, 
that  we  may  believe  in  a  life  immortal;  what  plane  or  table- 
land of  life  pays  the  best  returns?  The  question  is  an  end- 
lessly vital  one.  And  the  answer  is  precisely  the  answer  of 
the  Earth  Spirit  to  Faust: 

Du   gleichst   dem   Geist,   den   du   begreifst, 
Nicht  mir! 

thou  art  like  the  spirit  whom  thou  comprehendest,  not  like  me. 
If  your  comprehension,  your  grasp  of  life  is  large,  a  like  large- 
ness crowns  your  quest;  if  small  and  petty,  you  fall  just  so 


ON   THE  LARGER   SCALE  13 

much  below  the  possibilities  of  the  open  secret.  Not  the  mys- 
tery of  being  is  to  blame,  but  your  self-imposed  limitation. 
What  spirit  of  life,  then,  what  reach  and  principle  of  being, 
does  it  behoove  us,  if  we  may,  to  comprehend?  This  is  our 
crucial  question. 

In  business  of  psychic  research  there  are  things  curiously 
parallel  to  what  obtains  in  other  branches  of  science;  the  gen- 
eral method,  in  fact,  has  not  changed  at  all.  We  use  a  tele- 
scope to  look  at  the  stars;  we  use  a  microscope  to  look  at  the 
tissues,  the  throbbing  protoplasmic  elements  of  animal  life; 
and  we  are  at  the  end  of  our  quest  when  we  have  discovered, 
on  the  one  hand,  the  courses  of  planets  and  stars  and  suns, 
on  the  other  the  motions  of  minute  organic  cells  which  we  can 
contemplate  only  from  outside,  and  which  have  as  little  realiz- 
able meaning  as  has  the  glass  through  which  we  are  gazing. 
In  psychic  research,  too,  the  procedure  is  essentially  the  same; 
only,  as  the  question  concerns  the  survival  of  personality,  the 
lens  that  we  use  is  a  personal  one  which  we  call  a  medium; 
and  we  try  to  make  this  lens  as  achromatic  as  possible  by  di- 
vesting it  of  all  moral  character,  or  rather  immoral,  like  fraud 
and  mercenary  motives,  and  of  all  spiritual  character,  by 
putting  it  into  a  hypnotic  trance  wherein  it  lies  wholly  passive 
to  extrinsic  suggestion.  As  the  result  of  our  experiment  we 
get  back  some  of  our  own  personality,  some  of  the  medium's, 
and  —  and  —  well,  is  any  of  the  equivocal  residuum  left  over 
a  veritable  arrival  from  spirit-land?  It  is  exceedingly  hard 
to  determine;  almost  impossible  to  identify  and  prove  au- 
thentic. Some  doctors  say  no,  some  yes;  both  very  dubiously. 
And  what  does  the  thing  amount  to  after  we  have  got  it?  If 
it  brings  any  report  from  a  surviving  spirit,  it  seems  to  bring 
- 1  judge  from  the  kind  of  message  elicited  —  only  some 
trivial  shreds  of  personality,  dregs  squeezed  out  as  it  were 
from  the  subconscious  self,  as  freakish  as  dreams,  as  inane 
as  a  weather  report;  and  no  character,  nothing  large  and  up- 
lifting at  all.  No  wonder  this,  is  it?  For  it  was  not  character 
that  set  up  the  search ;  we  did  not  bring  our  essential  manhood 
to  the  quest,  but  only  our  curious  brain,  and  that  passive  lens 


14  \THE  LIFE  INDEED 

which  we  employed  as  medium.  And  it  was  not  character  that 
was  sought;  we  did  not  address  ourselves  to  that  fibre  of  the 
spiritual  personality  which  in  any  worth  or  dignity  of  character 
could  repay  our  outlay  of  experiment.  We  were  interrogating 
merely  the  bare  fact  of  existence  and  survival,  not  the  con- 
tents. Perhaps,  after  all,  we  obtained  as  much  as  we  brought 
with  us,  or  as  we  had  really  at  heart.  There  is  no  objection, 
intrinsically,  to  our  getting  proof  of  the  departed  souPs  actual 
existence  if  we  can;  no  more  objection  than  to  getting  proof 
that  the  planet  Mars  is  inhabited,  if  we  can. 

But  what  we  are  concerned  with  here,  is  the  scale  of  things, 
the  scale  of  ideal  and  spiritual  measurement,  that  all  this  con- 
notes. Water  cannot  rise  higher  than  its  source;  neither  can 
human  personality.  Of  the  human  destiny  that  we  are  setting 
out  to  consider  we  may,  with  the  scientists,  freely  concede  the 
same  thing:  it  cannot  be  assumed  to  rise  higher  than  the  power 
and  promise  embodied  in  it  at  the  source.  But  it  can  rise  as 
high  as  this.  It  ought,  if  it  was  well  planned  and  not  bungled 
and  thwarted,  to  rise  as  high.  Have  we  then  reckoned  our 
source  high  enough?  Is  the  scale  of  measurement  hitherto 
prevailing  large  enough,  worthy  enough,  self -justifying  enough, 
to  answer  to  the  creative  word  of  Him  who  when  He  brought 
.all  things,  with  their  store  of  possibilities,  into  being,  called 
them  one  and  all  very  good? 

A  valid  measurement  of  things,  as  we  know,  starts  with  the 
choice  of  a  unit  of  measure,  —  feet,  or  miles,  or  pounds,  or 
dollars.  Now  the  unit  with  which  the  prevailing  estimate  of 
immortal  personality  starts  is  the  universal  fact  of  physical 
death:  it  takes  note  of  the  phenomenon  that  looms  up  most 
inexorable  before  us  and  that  the  world  has  mourned  and 
feared  since  the  beginning  without  being  able  to  mitigate  or 
avert.  It  sees  that  there  is  no  discrimination;  that  the  unit 
is  as  accurate  and  absolute  as  that  by  which  we  calculate  the 
diameter  of  the  earth;  that  the  sage  and  the  fool,  the  holy  and 
the  profane,  the  child  and  the  idiot,  the  criminal  and  the  sui- 
cide, all  come  to  death  alike,  however  ripe  or  untimely  the 
event  may  be.  And  it  is  all  held  to  connote  one  thing:  that 


ON   THE  LARGER   SCALE  15 

somehow  this  human  nature,  so  fearfully  and  wonderfully 
made,  is  thereby  laid  in  ruins.  The  unit,  if  we  may  so  say, 
is  a  unit  of  dissolution  and  destruction;  and  the  problem  of 
possible  immortality  reduces  to  the  problem  of  discovering 
some  sort  of  survival,  some  pieces  of  the  wreck,  some  flotsam 
and  jetsam,  however  meagre,  rescued  from  the  ravage  of  death. 
From  the  material  point  of  view  a  hard,  nay,  an  insoluble 
problem.  For  when  the  catastrophe  is  over,  the  body  is  all 
there  still,  left  on  earth,  its  elements  still  weighable  and  chemi- 
cally analyzable,  all  accounted  for;  and  we  have  laid  away  in 
earth  all  the  organs  of  seeing  and  hearing  and  handling  and 
thinking,  every  one.  There  is  no  clear  sign  that  some  finer 
breath,  some  naked  essence  survives,  no  more  reason  on  this 
scale  of  insight,  for  supposing  that  an  emanation  of  the  brain 
goes  on  to  a  new  life,  than  for  supposing  that  an  emanation  of 
the  leg  does.  We  might  as  well  own  the  fact.  We  cannot  by 
material  science  follow  up  the  separation  of  body  and  soul. 
We  say  popularly  that  soul  and  body  are  two  things,  and  that 
they  are  dissociated  at  death;  but  for  the  rest  we  have  but 
faith.  We  cannot  know  —  on  this  scale  I  mean  —  even  that 
body  and  soul  are  two;  all  we  can  see  is  the  body,  which  for 
years  has  been  diseased  and  decaying,  and  finally  lapses  back 
to  its  elements  before  our  eyes.  Then  if  by  faith  —  or  con- 
jecture —  we  try  to  trace  the  history  of  this  so-called  surviving 
soul,  all  we  can  image  is  a  part  of  the  man,  a  piece  of  him, 
going  on,  and  that  the  part  that  some  deem  of  least  value;  and 
so,  being  only  a  part,  it  must  needs  lead  a  maimed  and  crippled 
existence  somewhere,  getting  on  the  best  it  can  without  organs 
of  sense  and  activity. 

This  is  not  a  caricatured  description;  it  was  the  sad  idea  of 
the  whole  world,  Hebrew,  Greek,  Egyptian  alike,  before  Christ 
came:  it  is  the  idea  of  millions  now.  It  underlay  the  imagin- 
ings of  Sheol  and  Hades;  nor  has  modern  science  done  any- 
thing to  mitigate  it,  except  in  the  direction  of  annihilation. 
And  the  best  it  can  certainly  affirm  of  the  other  state  of  exist- 
ence is,  that  when  the  soul  was  separated  from  the  body  it 
was  set  free  from  its  pains  and  diseases,  its  toils  and  hardships 


16  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

too,  and  at  all  events  is  now  at  rest.  To  be  sure,  worthier 
fancies  have  not  been  lacking.  The  soul  has  been  imagined  to 
be  somehow  wiser  elsewhere  than  here,  and  to  be  able  to  see 
into  things  that  were  enigmas  on  earth;  and  men  have  put 
questions  to  it  by  necromancy  and  tried  to  get  light  from  it  on 
earthly  affairs.  But  these  notions  were  fancies,  conjectures; 
they  did  not  grow  as  fruitage  from  a  deep-sown  seed  of  vital 
energy,  or  rest  on  a  basis  of  living  motive  and  principle. 

All  this  natural  enough,  perhaps,  but  it  betokens  a  sorry, 
petty,  puny  scale  of  things,  as  compared  with  the  scale  to 
which  the  Bible  conceptions  are  conformed.  It  is  making 
death  and  the  survival  of  death,  not  life  and  the  ennobling  of 
life,  the  unit  of  measure;  it  is  making  the  effort  of  man  cul- 
minate in  rescuing  a  piece  of  himself  from  the  ruins  of  nature; 
it  is  making  the  life  beyond  a  virtual  prolongation  of  the  life 
here,  with  its  material  and  sensual  ideals  transplanted  into  a 
conjectured  new  environment,  which  however,  so  far  as  inner 
standards  of  living  are  concerned,  is  a  projection  of  the  same 
old  plane.  To  interrogate  that  life  beyond  by  mediumship 
is  of  a  piece  with  all  the  rest.  Without  condemning  it  as  evil, 
we  must  say  it  is  low,  it  is  small,  it  is  petty;  the  fault  is  in  its 
scale  and  its  unit  of  measure.  The  healthy  instinct  of  Scrip- 
ture, as  we  know,  is  strongly  against  such  consulting  of  the 
dead.  Even  in  the  dim  Old  Testament  days  men  were  guided, 
whether  by  Providence  or  by  the  disdain  engendered  of  a 
higher  spiritual  ideal,  away  from  the  necromancy  that  in- 
fested all  around  the  Hebrew  people.  We  recall  Isaiah's  in- 
dignant words:  "And  when  they  shall  say  unto  you,  Seek  unto 
them  that  have  familiar  spirits,  and  unto  wizards  that  peep, 
and  that  mutter:  should  not  a  people  seek  unto  their  God? 
for  the  living  to  the  dead?  To  the  law  and  to  the  testimony: 
if  they  speak  not  according  to  this  word,  it  is  because  there  is 
no  light  in  them."  That  is  it.  The  scale  ought  to  be  the 
scale  of  life,  not  of  death;  of  life  as  guided  by  God  and  His 
recognized  will;  without  this  scale  of  measurement  there  is  no 
light  in  them.  It  is  only  along  this  line  that  life  and  immor- 
tality, in  the  only  sense  worthy  of  the  large  possibilities  of 
manhood,  can  come  to  light. 


ON   THE  LARGER   SCALE  17 

I  have  spoken  of  the  scale  hitherto  prevailing  in  secular  and 
scientific  matters.  But  the  prevailing  religious  and  doctrinal 
scale,  likewise,  is  too  small;  measured  by  too  confined  and 
partial  data;  true  as  far  as  it  goes,  doubtless,  but  needing  that 
juster  determination  of  emphasis  which  comes  of  enlargement. 
For  it  too  is  founded  on  the  unit  of  ruin  and  rescue,  of  a  fall 
of  man  and  eventual  redemption  from  it,  of  a  humanity  de- 
based by  a  primal  sin  which  only  a  world  miracle  can  heal, 
and  of  an  elaborate  plan  for  curing  it  so  that  finally,  here  or 
beyond  the  grave,  man  may  be  a  whole  man,  ready  to  do  man's 
work  and  fulfill  man's  functions.  Meanwhile  the  promise  and 
prophecy  that  has  persisted  at  the  roots  of  his  nature  in  spite 
of  that  original  ruin,  the  positive,  so  to  say,  which  has  more 
than  offset  the  negative,  has  received  too  meagre  recognition; 
the  stumbling-stone  of  sin  has  blocked  the  way.  In  other 
words,  the  ideal  hitherto  has  been  mainly  an  ideal  of  mending 
and  cobbling,  getting  men  into  a  kind  of  patched-up  order  to 
die  and  render  account.  The  questions  about  immortality 
have  mostly  been  conformed  to  this  standard:  questions 
whether  at  death  the  redemption,  in  the  individual  case,  is 
going  to  prove  valid  enough  after  all  to  pull  the  man  over  the 
line  into  heaven;  questions  of  so-called  conditional  immor- 
tality, —  what  are  the  conditions,  and  how  Christ  comes  in  for 
those  who  never  heard  of  him;  questions  of  the  chances  of  in- 
fants and  idiots  and  suicides;  questions  of  what  is  called  pro- 
bation after  death  for  those  who  have  not  had  a  fair  show  here. 
All  these  specimen  things  are  real  problems;  a  most  bewilder- 
ing tangle  of  problems,  indeed,  on  the  scale  of  things  in  which 
our  churches  and  systems  of  theology  have  hitherto  been  work- 
ing. I  am  not  going  to  try  any  detailed  answer  of  them.  I 
leave  them  to  the  churches  and  the  great  evangelizing  move- 
ments of  the  Christian  world.  I  think  I  do  not  court  contra- 
diction, however,  in  saying  that,  legitimate  questions  though 
they  be,  and  in  their  place  crucial,  there  is  the  note  of  small- 
ness  about  them  all;  they  lack  somehow  the  element  essential 
to  make  the  answer  to  them  self-authenticating.  They  need 
supplementation  by  the  realization  of  another  and  larger  scale 


1 8  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

of  things.  It  may  be  that  man  is  a  ruined  being,  who  needs 
mending  and  cobbler  work  to  get  him  into  repair.  It  may  be 
that  a  struggle  to  regain  lost  ground  is  the  first  thing  in  order. 
But  ought  this  idea  of  him  to  usurp  the  whole  field?  Should 
it  go  unexamined  and  untested,  as  containing  the  whole  mean- 
ing of  manhood  life? 

May  we  not  rather  let  this  retrieval  idea  rest  here  a  little, 
in  the  good  keeping  of  the  churches,  while  we  contemplate 
what  man  is  as  well  created,  what  he  is  in  good  repair  and 
fulness  of  function,  what  he  is  as  growing  from  infancy  and 
childhood  to  maturity  of  powers  and  ideals,  —  that  is,  as  a 
being  in  process  of  evolution,  graduaDy  sloughing  off  the  old 
members  and  functions  that  become  outworn  and  atrophied, 
gradually  coming  into  his  full  heritage  of  adult  manhood,  and 
when  that  summit  of  rounded  and  finished  organism  is  gained, 
like  Job  with  his  life's  record  on  his  shoulder,  facing  the  un- 
seen? Surely  it  is  no  unsafe  procedure  thus  to  strike  out  a 
little  from  the  stereotyped  order  of  inquiry. 

To  contemplate  manhood  so  calls  for  the  adoption  of  a 
new  scale  of  values,  a  new  field  of  investigation,  a  new  kind 
of  apparatus;  new  and  immensely  larger.  Our  imagination 
must  take  on  cosmic  and  universal  proportions.  We  have  seen 
things  dimly  and  dubiously  so  long  that  we  are  on  the  verge 
of  concluding  there  is  nothing  to  see.  But  before  we  so  con- 
clude, let  us  pause  to  ask  if  this  dimness  may  not  have  been 
because  we  had  not  developed  eyes  to  see,  or  because,  with 
eyes  only  partly  opened,  we  saw  men  as  trees  walking.  It  is 
just  on  this  simple  line  of  seeing,  of  evolving  organs  to  compre- 
hend what  has  always  existed,  that  our  scripture  text-book 
represents  immortality  as  being  brought  to  light;  and  the  light 
into  which  it  at  last  emerges  clear  and  self-evidencing,  is  just 
the  crystalline  radiance  that  beams  forth  from  the  life  itself, 
the  Life  Indeed.  This  is  the  summit  of  the  scale. 

And  this  is  as  we  would  have  it,  as  our  deepest  instinct  tells 
us  it  must  needs  be.  We  cannot  trust  a  truth  of  such  tremen- 
dous import  to  the  precarious  bolstering  of  logical  or  scientific 
proof,  which  it  takes  only  the  next  wave  of  thought  to  unsettle 


ON   THE  LARGER   SCALE  19 

again.  It  must  be  its  own  evidence,  standing  out  strong  above 
all  our  petty  scaffolding.  On  the  scale  to  which  we  have  hither- 
to been  committed  we  can  only  gyrate  round  in  circles  of  alter- 
nate gleam  and  eclipse;  and  that,  we  may  be  sure,  is  not  God's 
way  of  proving  the  truths  of  life. 

II.      ENLARGEMENT    DEMANDED    BY 
EVOLUTIONARY     SCIENCE 

To  say  this  is  by  no  means  to  discredit  science,  nor  to  warn 
it  off  the  field.  It  is  merely  demanding  that  science  rise  to 
its  occasion.  And  indeed  science  is  nobly  responding.  It,  no 
less  truly  than  Scripture,  is  demanding  an  enlargement  of  the 
scale  of  vital  values;  timidly  perhaps  as  yet,  and  half  afraid 
of  the  vision  that  is  opening  before  it;  but  surely,  as  soon  as 
it  leaves  its  microscope  long  enough  to  think,  finding  itself 
launched  on  a  more  spacious  ocean  of  being,  which  sooner  or 
later  it  must  needs  navigate.  For  within  the  past  few  years, 
within  the  easy  memory  of  men  not  yet  aged,  science  has 
named  a  magic  word,  the  word  evolution;  and  that  word  has 
laid  down  a  new  unit  for  all  its  measurements.  The  conception 
of  evolution  has  transformed  every  view  of  the  world.  In 
these  few  years  it  has  become  a  necessity,  almost  a  tyranny,  in 
all  our  estimates  of  things;  if  we  do  not  accept  its  material 
conclusions  about  species  and  interrelations  of  being,  we  can- 
not help  thinking  in  its  terms. 

This  instinct  of  the  evolutionary  is  shown  very  significantly 
by  science  itself,  in  the  attitude  it  takes  toward  psychic  re- 
search; which,  as  we  know,  has  had  hard  ado  to  get  adopted 
into  the  scientific  family  at  all,  and  even  now  holds  such  place 
only  by  sufferance,  as  if  it  occupied  at  best  only  a  kind  of 
scientific  borderland.  I  speak  of  this  branch  of  research 
merely  as  it  is  confessedly  looking  beyond  the  bourn  of  death; 
when  it  confines  itself  to  the  arcana  of  personality  this  side 
of  the  veil  its  legitimation  is  more  freely  conceded.  Why  this 
strange  instinct  against  it?  we  ask;  and  can  only  answer,  be- 
cause such  psychic  research  is  felt  to  be  not  in  the  true  evolu- 


20  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

tionary  idiom.  By  trying,  as  it  does,  to  look  through  a 
mediumistic  lens  and  see  what  the  dead  are  doing  now,  to  get 
a  sort  of  back-stairs  entrance  among  the  spirits,  it  is  merely 
projecting  the  ideal  of  life  onward  along  the  same  old  material 
plane.  It  has,  so  far  forth,  no  eyes  for  a  larger  development 
of  being;  it  represents,  in  short,  an  evolution  that  does  not 
evolve.  A  peep-hole  revelation,  I  was  profane  enough  a  little 
while  ago  to  call  this  sort  of  thing.  George  Eliot,  who  as  we 
know  was  a  strenuous  votary  of  modern  science,  was  more 
caustic  still;  she  called  it  "a  rat-hole  revelation."  Now  by  this 
healthy  antipathy  psychic  research  is  not  accused  of  being 
false,  or  even  unscientific:  it  is  merely  felt  to  be  floundering 
still  in  the  obsolete  presuppositions  of  science,  when  men  were 
doing  nothing  but  observing,  sticking  pins  in  butterflies  and 
making  endless  collections,  while  the  end  of  which  these  pre- 
liminaries were  but  means  already  looms  up  far  beyond.  It 
is  a  belated  type  of  exploration;  what  the  slangsters  call  a 
back-number.  And  therefore,  while  it  may  still  gather  much 
on  this  material  and  psychological  plane,  as  regards  the  life 
beyond  it  is  bound  to  be  barren.  The  vast  concept  of  evolu- 
tion has  put  it  out  of  court. 

Now  evolution,  if  it  is  a  permanent  fact  and  not  temporary, 
has  got  to  go  on  past  the  physical  death  of  man.  We  cannot 
stop  its  majestic  wheels;  cannot  think  it  down  to  the  paltry 
thing  it  would  be  if  we  put  its  full-stop  there.  Consider  the 
case.  The  highest  product  of  biological  evolution,  as  all  con- 
cede, is  man ;  the  highest  that  there  is  room  for  in  this  material 
world.  "The  beauty  of  the  world!  the  paragon  of  animals!" 
is  how  Shakespeare  describes  him.  On  earth,  as  John  Fiske 
said,  there  will  never  be  a  higher  being  than  man;  there  will 
never  be  a  higher  life  than  manhood  life.  The  huge  tide  of 
evolutionary  vitality,  which  began  away  back  with  the  throb 
of  unicellular  protoplasm,  which  swept  upward  through  plants 
and  jelly-like  things,  through  rudimental  organs  and  functions, 
through  countless  lower  animal  stages,  reaches  its  climax,  its 
utmost,  in  that  paragon  of  animals,  man.  Then  it  sojourns 
with  man  awhile,  until  he  gets  started  a  little  on  his  education, 


ON   THE  LARGER  SCALE  21 

and  it  adds  an  intellectual  element  unknown  before,  the  growth 
of  self-conscious  mind,  and  with  this  the  growth  of  arts,  and 
social  relations,  and  institutions,  wonderful  things  all.  Yet 
all  this  while  man  continues  as  frail  as  any  creature  below 
him,  and  even  more  subject  to  infirmities  of  the  flesh;  for  all 
his  brain  achievements  do  not  seem  to  have  mended  evolution 
in  this  regard.  And  then,  at  a  wholly  incalculable  moment, 
comes  death,  and  so  far  as  we  can  see  ends  it  all.  Reflect  that 
this  is  the  extinction  of  the  highest  being  yet  evolved;  that  at 
this  moment  the  vital  motion  which  began  so  far  back  and  so 
far  down  fades  out  of  the  tissues,  and  these  revert  to  inorganic 
dust.  What  an  elemental  injustice  seems  to  be  in  such  ending, 
and  yet  how  easy.  It  is  not  hard  to  make  a  man  die,  as  we 
should  expect  it  would  be  if  death  were  so  momentous  a  catas- 
trophe. A  breath  of  air,  a  drop  of  water  suffices,  as  Pascal 
says,  to  kill  him;  nay,  men  themselves  treat  death  as  a  trivial 
thing,  rushing  impetuously  upon  it  in  battles  and  massacres 
and  foolhardy  risks.  Is  this  then  the  finality,  the  end  of  the 
play?  If  so,  then  evolution  is  a  paltry  thing,  false  and  hypo- 
critical; the  vast  animal  world  is  a  botch  and  bungle;  the 
forces  of  a  universe,  with  their  myriad  motions  of  growth  and 
heredity  and  development,  have  been  desperately  laboring  to 
pick  up  and  lay  down  a  straw. 

No;  it  is  unthinkable.  An  evolution  which  has  proved  itself 
capable  of  rolling  up  such  a  mighty  product  must  still  be  in 
full  tide,  must  still  go  on,  beyond  our  sight  and  sense,  beyond 
what  our  brain  has  shaped  in  thought,  beyond  both  matter  and 
mind.  We  cannot  put  so  tremendous  a  stoppage  of  the  order 
of  things  at  the  moment  of  man's  bodily  death.  If  we  could, 
the  power  to  stay  an  infinite  creative  course  would  be  within 
the  compass  of  puny  man,  and  of  the  base  in  man,  as  soon  as 
he  could  get  his  torpedo  boats  and  machine  guns  deadly 
enough.  No;  we  cannot  think  any  end  to  that  majestic  current 
of  which  we,  willing  or  unwilling,  are  a  part,  any  more  than 
we  can  think  a  bound  to  space  or  an  end  to  time;  we  are  in 
it  and  swept  along  by  it.  We  have  some  faint  extrinsic  notion 
of  its  source  among  the  eternal  hills;  we  have  a  still  vaguer 


22  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

notion  of  the  ocean  to  which  we  are  bound;  but  one  thing  our 
magic  idea  of  evolution  will  not  let  us  accept,  namely,  that  it 
is  an  ocean  of  death. 

But  if  evolution  goes  on,  how  shall  it  go  on?  It  has  done 
part  of  its  work,  and  done  it  well.  We  are  filled  with  awe  and 
wonder  at  the  infinite  plan  displayed  in  it.  But  its  bodily  po- 
tencies are  exhausted  in  this  life  and  in  man;  this  we  know, 
not  because  man  must  die,  but  because  with  his  larger  needs 
man  must  go  on  beyond  the  point  where  bodily  powers  fail, 
must  supplement  his  eye  by  spectacles  and  his  hand  by  cun- 
ningly devised  machinery.  We  know  it  too  because  these 
potencies  return  eventually  on  themselves;  they  are  not  aug- 
mented by  heredity;  the  next  generation  has  it  all  to  do  over 
again,  going  through  the  endless  circle  of  birth,  maturing,  and 
decay.  Does  then  the  intellect,  which  invented  such  clever 
tools  and  made  such  conquests  of  thought,  give  signs  of  greater 
promise?  Has  it  through  the  evolutionary  millenniums  grown 
so  large  that  it  must  have  a  new  world  to  fit  it?  Well,  that  is 
not  so  clear.  It  is  not  clear,  looking  over  a  long  tract  of  years 
during  which  knowledge  has  been  increased,  that  we  are  very 
far  in  advance  of  the  mind  of  Plato.  Besides,  too,  the  mind 
is  at  the  mercy  of  the  body,  yielding  to  its  diseases  and  casu- 
alties; and  so  at  the  mercy  of  environment,  yielding  to  the  ex- 
actions of  age  and  race  and  climate  and  custom.  Like  the  body 
also  it  seems  to  return  on  itself  and  move  in  a  self -completing 
circle,  from  childhood  to  second  childhood.  Here  then  is  the 
situation:  the  world  tide  of  evolution  on  the  one  side,  which 
must  go  on;  universal  death  on  the  other,  which  must  exact 
its  due.  It  is  much  like  the  old  problem  which  we  used 
to  laugh  over  as  children:  if  an  irresistible  body  meets  an 
immovable  obstacle,  what  ensues?  It  looks  as  if  the  im- 
possible had  become  the  actual;  it  is  so,  whether  it  can  be  so 
or  not. 

Well,  we  might  as  well  laugh  over  it  as  cry;  and  oddly 
enough  that  other  old  pleasantry  comes  to  mind  here,  "If  you 
are  between  the  devil  and  the  deep  sea,  there  is  nothing  for  it 
but  to  take  to  the  woods."  In  other  words,  we  must  needs 


ON  THE  LARGER  SCALE  23 

betake  ourselves  to  what  the  lawyers  call  a  change  of  venue; 
or  as  we  are  maintaining  here,  our  science  demands  an  enlarge- 
ment of  scale,  whereon  evolution  shall  call  into  play  powers 
hitherto  unexercised  and  unreckoned  with.  Otherwise,  for 
the  great  future  we  are  still  committed  to  mending  and  cobbler 
work,  to  extricating  the  broken  and  twisted  fragments  from 
the  ruins  of  nature  and  getting  them  into  some  sort  of  repair 
for  a  new  lease  of  more  or  less  crippled  survival.  And  this, 
in  itself,  is  as  unthinkable  as  the  rest.  We  must  have  a  change 
of  venue;  must  find  some  vital  principle  still  more  august, 
something  which  never  yielded  to  decay  and  deterioration  at 
all,  but  was  in  full  vigor  still  and  growing  when  untimely 
death  supervened.  In  other  words,  we  must  seek  a  principle 
whose  evolutionary  potency  is  just  beginning  or  ready  to  begin, 
when  other  powers  yield  to  failure.  If  such  a  principle  could 
be  found,  it  might  not  only  bear  the  essential  being  onward  be- 
yond death,  but  who  knows?  it  might  conceivably  redeem  all 
the  rest,  furnishing  them  the  needed  vehicle  for  renewed  life, 
and  so  do  the  repair  work  which  is  so  evidently  needed;  doing 
it  so  well  that  all  the  cobblings  and  solderings  should  be  swal- 
lowed up  in  the  larger  glory  and  strength.  A  tremendous 
dream  this;  but  does  not  the  authentic  involvement  of  con- 
tinued evolution  demand  it?  Can  it  accept  less? 

All  this  is  but  another  way  of  saying  what  John  Fiske  and 
others  have  already  said,  that  from  this  point  onward,  from 
the  point  where  our  lenses  and  calculating  apparatus  fail, 
human  evolution  must  be  spiritual.  Manhood  must  rise  to  a 
higher  order  and  standard  of  being;  its  immortality  absolutely 
depends  on  it.  Form,  habitat,  and  laws  of  that  larger  being 
are  inconceivable  except  as  coordinated  with  the  life  of  the 
spirit. 

It  is  no  presumption  against  the  reality  of  this  uprise  that 
we  cannot  trace  it,  or  cannot  on  our  present  scale  of  biological 
values  even  comprehend  it.  To  make  room  for  it  and  hold  it 
true  is  only  following  out  the  observable  order  of  nature.  The 
course  of  development  that  has  brought  us  hither  is  full  of 
such  strange  epochs,  where  all  at  once  a  new  and  broader  world 


24  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

of  being  opens  above,  and  there  flows  into  it  an  order  of  life 
absolutely  inconceivable  to  the  consciousness  of  the  stage  be- 
low; as  inconceivable  as  is  a  fourth  dimension  to  us  who  are 
so  sure  that  length,  breadth,  and  thickness  take  up  all  the 
space  of  the  universe.  Professor  Shaler  speaks  of  "many, 
very  many,  instances  in  which  the  apparently  uniform  proc- 
esses of  Nature,  those  which  are  indeed  uniform  in  their  steps 
of  action,  lead  to  sudden  and  complete  changes  of  result." 
We  can  all  see  how  true  this  is.  Water  in  the  fluid  state,  for 
instance,  if  it  were  endowed  with  consciousness,  could  not  con- 
ceive of  itself  as  a  solid,  as  ice;  could  not  conceive  of  itself  as 
a  gas,  as  steam;  yet  these  exist  under  their  conditions,  with 
wholly  new  properties,  and  it  takes  nothing,  apparently,  but  a 
slight  change  of  temperature  to  make  the  difference.  A  plant 
has  the  same  chemical  elements  in  it,  and  the  same  make-up 
of  vital  cells,  as  an  animal;  yet  it  is  absolutely  shut  out,  except 
as  food  and  shade,  from  the  animal  world  above  it.  An  animal 
has  the  same  protoplasmic  tissues,  the  same  endowment  of 
senses,  as  a  man;  returns  to  dust  in  the  selfsame  way;  as 
Ecclesiastes  says,  "one  breath  have  they  both."  We  can 
enter  into  its  life,  of  sense  and  instinct;  yet  the  life  of  our 
higher  world,  with  its  thoughts  and  ideals,  nay  with  the  very 
use  we  can  make  of  senses  and  instincts,  is  utterly  inconceiv- 
able to  its  plane  of  being.  Where  and  when  does  the  animal 
evolve  into  the  man,  biologists  are  inquiring;  yet  at  some  mys- 
terious rapids  in  the  current  of  being  great  Nature  made  the 
transformation;  and  now  by  the  side  of  the  dog  exists  another 
animal,  his  master,  who  is  more  than  animal,  and  the  dog  can 
only  worship  and  love  him,  but  not  understand.  Just  so  we 
are  looking  up  from  beneath  to  some  inconceivable  higher 
stage  of  being;  and  men  are  feeling  the  need  of  it  and  clamor 
for  it.  For  in  one  respect  our  analogy  of  plants  and  animals 
does  not  hold;  the  next  stage  beyond  us  is  not  all  inconceivable. 
The  far-off  dawn  of  it  began  to  stir  the  East  as  soon  as  man 
launched  out  from  his  animal  nature  to  explore  new  tracts  of 
being.  And  now  in  these  latest  days  a  philosopher,  Nietzsche, 
whose  untempered  vision  drove  him  crazy,  and  a  playwright, 


ON   THE   LARGER   SCALE  25 

Bernard  Shaw,  whose  sense  of  the  world's  crookedness  has 
involved  him  in  a  tangle  of  paradox,  are  calling  for  a  Super- 
man to  help  us  out  of  our  slough,  a  man  who  they  think,  in 
perverse  ignoring  of  what  has  long  been  revealed,  is  not  yet 
born.  And  their  philosophic  ideal  is  essentially  the  one  to 
which  our  new  scientific  law  is  forcing  us.  It  maintains,  as 
sound  thinking  must  needs  maintain,  that  manhood  evolution, 
in  order  to  break  its  deadlock  and  go  on  at  all,  must  hence- 
forth be  spiritual. 

Of  this  contemplated  spiritual  stage  of  evolution,  whatever 
that  may  involve,  I  have  occasion  here  for  only  two  remarks; 
but  these  are  weighty  for  their  bearing  on  our  whole 
inquiry. 

The  first  is,  that  this  ought  to  be,  as  the  scientific  termi- 
nology expresses  it,  not  catastrophic,  that  is,  not  coming  in  by 
miracle  or  some  supramundane  irruption  from  without,  but 
truly  evolutionary,  that  is,  rising  naturally  out  of  powers  and 
capacities  already  existing  within  our  human  nature.  In  this 
stipulation  we  may  freely  concede  all  that  the  higher  biology 
demands.  We  of  the  churches  have  reproached  scientists  for 
their  fight  against  miracles  and  the  supernatural;  have  called 
them  skeptics  and  thought  of  them  as  wicked.  Well,  this  is 
the  meaning  of  their  skepticism:  they  are  not  perverse,  not 
vicious,  not  undevout;  but  they  want  a  life  beyond  of  which 
we  as  human  beings  so  marvelously  made  can  avail  ourselves 
without  belying  the  laws  of  thought  and  imagination  which 
are  already  in  us.  They  want  to  play  their  part  in  life  and 
bring  the  solution  of  the  plot  without  the  arbitrary  agency  of 
a  deus  ex  machina.  Perhaps  they  are  wrong;  perhaps  they 
are  excluding  from  their  scheme  an  element  of  the  evolution 
which,  being  unseen,  is  none  the  less  real  for  not  betraying  its 
divinity.  But  if  they,  with  their  loyalty  to  reason,  are  wrong, 
we  need  not  fear  to  make  common  cause  and  be  wrong  with 
them.  Perhaps  it  is  a  question  of  names  after  all.  What  they 
do  not  want  is  the  God  and  the  miracles  which  the  narrower 
and  dimmer  ages,  the  ages  of  the  smaller  scale,  have  imagined; 
and  perhaps  when  they  see  the  real  power  as  it  is,  working 


26  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

though  it  does  by  traceable  evolutionary  methods,  they  will 
name  it  God  and  most  eagerly  concede  its  supernatural  char- 
acter. We  must  all  live  and  learn.  And  just  as  Adam  in  his 
more  primitive  world  had  to  name  the  creatures  that  were 
brought  to  him,  so  as  our  world  gets  more  majestic  we  have 
gradually  to  recognize  and  acknowledge  the  spiritual  powers 
that  we  have  for  pattern  and  company.  Meanwhile  let  us  not 
shun  to  take  the  scientists  on  their  own  stipulated  ground.  Let 
the  life  that  we  set  out  to  explore,  with  all  its  strange  events, 
be  seen  as  a  life  not  catastrophic  but  evolutionary.  Let  its 
energies  and  achievements  be  seen  as  genuinely  human  and 
available  for  man  as  man.  And  not  supernatural  too,  not  di- 
vine? Well,  that  depends  on  how  these  connect  with  the  deeper 
realities  of  the  world.  It  will  not  pay  to  be  intolerant  and 
exclusive  here  either;  and  if  we  discover  of  the  soul  of  man, 
as  did  the  poet,  that 

Ere  she  gain  her  Heavenly-best,  a  God  must  mingle  with  the  game, 

we  need  not  put  the  possibility  frowardly  away  from  us.  The 
discovery  may  be  great  enough  to  warrant  it;  and  if  so,  surely 
we  have  no  call  to  withhold  its  true  name. 

The  second  remark  is,  that  on  the  larger  scale  of  vital  values 
demanded  by  evolutionary  science  we  need  to  take  fitting  note 
not  merely  of  the  fact  of  continued  life  but  of  its  nature.  The 
unit  of  the  ideal  is  not  really  the  immortality  of  the  soul,  in  the 
paltry  sense  that  Greek  philosophy  and  modern  dualism  have 
given  it,  the  sense,  that  is,  of  soul  separated  from  and  sur- 
viving body.  As  guided  by  the  evolution  idea,  indeed,  it  does 
not  even  stop  to  inquire  whether  man  has  a  soul,  conceived  I 
mean  as  an  appendage  to  body  and  brain,  and  separable  in 
such  a  way  as  to  leave  a  piece  of  the  man  behind  while  another 
part  floats  away  as  a  conjectured  naked  essence.  All  this  is 
still  in  the  dubious  idiom  of  the  smaller  scale.  Of  course 
death,  what  Dr.  Smyth  calls  the  place  of  death  in  evolution, 
has  to  be  reckoned  with;  but  the  man  who  is  evolved  into  the 
hereafter  is  the  whole  man,  moving  all  together  if  he  move  at 
all.  Begin  to  subtract  from  man  as  you  see  him  here  in  the 


ON  THE  LARGER   SCALE  27 

body,  in  order  to  leave  a  residuum  that  may  survive,  and  you 
cannot  stop  until  you  have  annihilated  the  man.  In  other 
words,  it  is  not  survival  but  —  amazing  as  it  may  seem  — 
resurrection,  dz/curracris ,  the  rising  to  a  higher  life,  to  a  high 
law  and  range  of  being,  that,  as  veritable  fact,  evolution  is 
forcing  us  to.  This  is  what  makes  the  matter,  on  the  biological 
scale,  so  inconceivable:  we  are  confronting  a  stage  of  being  as 
much  higher  and  completer  than  this  as  the  human  is  above 
the  animal,  with  all  the  values  of  the  present  stage  intact  yet 
sweeping  onward  in  new  conditions  and  dimensions.  There 
is  no  name  for  this  but  uprise,  resurrection. 

Let  us  disentangle  this  idea  from  its  non-essentials.  Resur- 
rection,—  does  not  this  connote  death,  as  if  one  must  needs 
die  in  order  to  rise?  Well,  that  is  as  it  may  be.  The  fact  that 
physical  death  is  universal  is  not  to  be  taken  as  meaning  that 
physical  death  is  a  necessary  prerequisite  to  resurrection.  May 
not  man  rise  from  the  maturity  of  nature  as  truly  as  from  its 
ruins?  Why  should  the  spirit  have  to  postpone  its  life  until 
the  body  dies?  It  is  the  enlargement  of  being  that  counts,  the 
uprise  not  from  nature  but  from  a  certain  form  and  organism 
of  matter.  Nor  will  it  do  here  to  complicate  this  idea  with 
questions  of  the  body  and  the  flesh.  These  will  come  up  for 
consideration  at  the  due  time.  Meanwhile  it  is  enough  to 
grasp  this  truth:  that  our  modern  science,  our  idea  that  the 
way  of  created  nature  is  evolution,  is  directed  straight  toward 
the  issue  of  resurrection.  In  some  sense  most  real  and  au- 
thentic this  is  the  teleology  of  life.  So  we  are  brought  to  the 
point  where  without  equivocation  we  may  answer  Professor 
Goldwin  Smith's  question,  "Is  there  another  life?"  No,  we 
may  frankly  say:  this,  with  its  potencies  of  enlargement,  is 
all  the  life  there  is.  But  if  he  takes  this  as  evasive  and  asks, 
Is  there  an  immortality?  Yes,  we  may  confidently  answer; 
for  if  there  is  continued  evolution  there  is  resurrection,  and 
resurrection  includes  immortality  as  the  greater  includes  the 
less. 


28     -  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

III.      ENLARGEMENT    AS    MEASURED    BY 
SCRIPTURE    CONCEPTIONS 

That  our  manhood's  evolution,  whatever  its  unimagined 
goal,  must  henceforth  follow  the  line  of  the  spiritual;  —  if  this 
is  the  pass  to  which  scientific  thinking  has  brought  us,  we 
must  own  how  natural  it  is  to  turn  to  the  ancient  records  and 
ask  what  the  Bible  says  about  it.  It  is  not  wise  to  think  scorn 
of  an  old  book  just  because  it  is  old  and  we  are  new;  it  is  a 
cheap  and  childish  attitude  to  take.  And  especially  of  this 
old  book,  it  is  like  kicking  away  the  ladder  by  which  we  have 
climbed.  Here  is  a  book  that  in  quaint  Hebrew  phraseology 
records  spiritual  data  from  a  very  early  period;  no,  not  a 
book,  a  literature  rather,  written  at  various  times  while  the 
phenomena  of  life  were  fresh  and  vital  issues;  written  by  a 
people  who  seemed  to  have  been  set  apart  for  the  purpose,  who 
had  the  genius  for  spiritual  exploration,  just  as  the  Greeks  had 
the  genius  for  art  and  philosophy,  and  as  the  Romans  had  the 
genius  for  organization  and  administration.  It  is  to  this  Bible 
of  the  Hebrews  that  we  most  naturally  betake  ourselves,  if 
we  would  have  an  authoritative  text-book  of  the  data  and  prin- 
ciples of  spiritual  evolution.  Whether  it  will  answer  to  our 
modern  scheme  of  things,  and  especially  whether  in  the  large 
it  will  satisfy  the  scientific  spirit  that  so  conditions  our  present- 
day  thinking,  —  well,  that  remains  to  be  seen. 

But,  as  I  have  intimated,  a  great  deal  depends,  nay,  for 
our  question,  all  depends,  on  the  way  we  read  the  Bible.  A 
new  reading  of  it  is  certainly  the  first  requisite.  Consider  the 
case.  A  great  expansion  of  spiritual  insight  and  foresight  is 
in  this  age  coming  upon  our  race ;  science  itself  is  contributing 
to  it;  the  Bible  as  we  have  read  it  has  laid  its  foundations  and 
determined  its  approaches.  Now  spiritual  insight,  in  its  es- 
sential elements,  is  a  thing  timeless  and  universal;  it  makes  its 
way  in  the  ages,  not  as  does  logical  insight,  fainting  and  doubt- 
ing under  endless  mistakes,  but  rather  by  trusting  its  deep  in- 
stincts as  far  as  they  go,  and  wreaking  its  wealth  of  life  upon 
them.  Such  has  been  the  inner  history  of  man,  as  Hebrew 


ON   THE  LARGER   SCALE  29 

insight  has  traced  it.  To  read  the  Bible,  then,  as  our  too 
arrogant  science  does,  as  if  it  were  an  obsolete  lie,  or  a  crude 
nation's  vagaries,  is  to  put  it  at  the  mercy  of  time  and  clime, 
to  make  it  myopic,  like  science  itself,  and  subject  to  the  shifts 
of  logic.  But  to  read  it  as  dogmatic  theology  and  religiosity 
hitherto  has  done,  does  not  greatly  better  the  case.  Our  pur- 
view must  be  larger.  The  prophecy  that  we  find  in  it  must  not 
be  of  private  interpretation.  We  must  estimate  it  by  a  larger 
scale  of  measurement;  must  project  its  histories  and  concep- 
tions against  the  background  of  a  more  spacious  universe. 
If  then  it  proves  too  small,  or  in  any  way  invalid,  let  the  fact 
appear.  If  on  the  other  hand  it  is  seen  to  have  risen  to  the 
huge  occasion,  let  us  not  miss  the  benefit  of  it.  And  mean- 
while, we  can  well  afford  to  let  some  of  the  lesser  questions  of 
detail  wait  until  their  time  comes,  until  they  can  be  approached 
with  the  fitting  presuppositions.  We  need  not  begin,  for  in- 
stance, by  puttering  with  questions  of  a  legislated  and  pre- 
carious immortality,  questions  of  mending  and  cobbler  work, 
of  conditional  immortality  and  future  probation  and  general 
soul  repairs.  These  will  fall  duly  into  place  when  the  larger 
setting  is  seen  as  it  is,  —  or  else,  what  is  more  likely,  be  lost 
in  light,  like  the  spots  on  the  sun.  Nor,  in  truth,  can  they 
be  brought  to  a  luminous  and  self-evidencing  solution  on  any 
smaller  projection  of  things.  In  a  word,  the  problem  of  im- 
mortality concerns  manhood  as  a  whole,  not  merely  Christian 
or  heathen  manhood,  and  life  as  a  vast  world  entity,  not 
merely  life  as  doctored  up  somehow,  or  as  lived  by  a  saint  or 
philosopher.  We  have  the  Scripture's  own  word  of  its  proph- 
ecy that  this  is  not  of  private  interpretation.  The  Bible, 
no  less  than  science,  demands  to  be  taken  on  the  cosmic  and 
universal  scale,  the  scale  of  eternity.  To  this  scale  it  is  that 
from  the  beginning  its  spiritual  findings  are  adjusted. 

In  this  new  reading  of  the  Bible  we  must  needs  first  of  all 
determine  our  attitude  toward  the  thing  that  has  done  most 
to  give  men  pause:  the  assumption,  namely,  that  it  is  an  in- 
spired revelation  from  the  ultimate  Source  of  life,  the  Father 
of  spirits.  This  is  not  a  thing  to  asume,  but,  if  true,  to  dis- 


30  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

cover.  Every  one  must  make  the  discovery  for  himself;  no 
other  can  make  it  inwardly  for  him.  And  if  we  waive  this 
assumption;  we  are  set  free  from  the  doubts  that  inevitably 
go  with  it,  doubts  rising  out  of  its  literary  origin,  adequacy, 
transmission;  our  evidence  is  of  quite  another  kind,  and  not 
at  all  at  the  mercy  of  such  questions.  If  we  still  shrink  from 
committing  ourselves  to  the  Bible,  in  nervous  dread  of  miracles 
and  the  supernatural,  if  we  quarrel  with  this  element  as  if  here 
we  must  put  a  preliminary  negation,  let  us  consider  how  truly 
in  any  case  we  must  confront  it  and  judge  it  not  by  names  but 
by  its  intrinsic  merits.  We  do  not  escape  the  supernatural  by 
abjuring  the  Bible  and  taking  to  science.  For  science  itself  is 
forced  to  recognize  one  miracle,  one  absolutely  transcendent, 
inexplicable  thing.  That  is  the  advent  of  life  itself.  We  know 
how  helpless  the  most  penetrative  stretch  of  knowledge  is  be- 
fore this.  With  all  the  savant's  pride  of  explaining  the  uni- 
verse, this,  the  initial  fact  of  all,  completely  baffles  him.  Here 
are  two  specks  of  jelly-like  matter,  exactly  alike  in  weight 
and  size  and  chemical  structure.  One  is  inert,  soggy,  passive 
to  decomposing  forces  from  without;  the  other  protoplasmic, 
throbbing  with  a  mysterious  energy  called  life,  and  in  that 
smallest  compass  containing  strange  potencies  of  growth,  or- 
ganism, inherited  traits.  What  is  the  point  of  difference? 
What  is  this  thing  life,  and  whence?  It  is  here,  but  no  chemist 
or  biologist  can  tell  where  it  came  from,  how  it  got  there,  what 
is  its  relation  to  unseen  forces.  It  is  an  unexplained  wonder, 
which  they  can  see  only  from  the  outside;  and  science  must, 
to  start  with,  assume  this  main  miracle.  Well,  that  is  all  we 
assume  here,  all  that  the  Bible  assumes.  It  puts  the  main 
miracle  just  where  science  must  needs  put  it,  and  only  there. 
Starting  from  that,  it  follows  the  continuous  evolution  that  be- 
gins there;  onward  and  upward  to  its  culmination  in  an  un- 
imagined  destiny.  On  the  larger  scale  which  alone  can  compass 
the  involvements  of  its  record,  it  is  the  history  of  that  man- 
hood evolution. 

But,  it  may  be  objected  here,  the  Bible  account  toward  the 
end  makes  another  miracle  supervene  which  science  cannot 


ON   THE  LARGER  SCALE  31 

receive  so  easily:  the  alleged  resurrection  of  Christ.  No;  that 
is  not  another  miracle.  It  is  the  other  pole  of  the  same,  the 
consistent  outcome  of  the  life  so  begun,  so  evolved,  as  the 
Bible  traces  its  elements.  It  is  the  same  life  raised  to  its 
highest  power  and  entering  upon  its  native  heritage.  This 
miracle,  if  miracle  it  be,  the  Bible  views  as  essentially  a  man- 
hood thing;  calls  it  the  resurrection  of  the  Son  of  man,  of  Him 
who  as  intrinsic  man  identified  Himself  with  the  life  that  it  is 
in  man  to  live,  saying,  "I  am  the  life."  Passing  wonderful 
this  is,  I  grant  it;  but  what  otherwise  is  life  itself,  as  soon  as 
we  apply  to  it  the  spiritual  measure  and  potency?  And  with 
all  its  miraculous  look,  it  merely  gives  concrete  form  to  a 
mystery  which  science  can  as  little  evade  as  it  can  the  inex- 
plicable beginning.  It  puts  into  individual  expression  the 
thing  that  comes  of  following  life  according  to  what  science 
itself  acknowledges  must  be  its  evolutionary  destiny. 

The  difference  is,  that  while  science,  going  back  to  the  germ, 
tries  to  make  life  as  small  as  it  looks,  the  Bible  boldly  yet 
reverently  makes  it  as  large  as  it  becomes.  In  the  beginning 
it  already  sees  the  glory  of  the  end.  Evolution  must  needs 
have  a  starting-point;  and  men  have  groped  and  dredged  for 
this,  in  the  sea-slime  and  in  the  uncouth  products  of  their 
laboratories,  all  in  a  blind  guess-work,  working  at  the  idea 
of  spontaneous  generation.  All  friendly  speed  to  them;  we 
ought  perhaps  to  test  to  the  utmost  what  comes,  or  does  not 
come,  of  making  the  beginning  of  life  mechanical  and  ma- 
terial. The  Bible,  seeing  to  what  spiritual  heights  life  rises, 
makes  its  evolutionary  starting-point  spiritual.  The  very  first 
event  that  startled  the  waste  of  chaos  was,  "And  the  spirit  of 
God  was  brooding  upon  the  face  of  the  waters";  brooding,  like 
a  mother-bird,  as  if  it  would  warm  the  waste  into  life.  So  it 
is  that  it  accounts  for  the  main  miracle,  the  entrance  of  life 
on  our  earth.  In  that  event  it  sees  stored  up  all  the  vital 
energies,  all  the  potencies,  that  come  to  light  in  what  follows. 

It  is  very  important,  I  think,  to  keep  in  mind  this  scripture 
conception  that  if  a  God  mingled  with  the  game  at  all  He  was 
moving  in  it  from  the  very  beginning.  There  is  no  point  in  the 


32  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

tide  of  life  where  we  can  read  Him  out  of  the  world,  leaving 
it  a  mere  weltering  chaos;  or  even  where  we  can  put  Him  on 
a  throne  sitting  somewhere  outside  of  this  mechanism  which 
He  has  wound  up,  and  seeing  it  go.  That  is  to  say,  here  in  our 
Bible  is  contemplated  an  evolution  of  which  the  initial  im- 
pulse, the  determining  principle,  is  not  only  spiritual  but  di- 
vine. It  is  here,  as  we  see,  that  the  gulf  opens  between  the 
Bible  and  the  present-day  stage  of  natural  science.  Science, 
we  may  truly  say,  is  fighting  against  a  light.  It  insists  on 
postulating  nothing  supernatural,  that  is,  transcendent.  It 
looks  at  those  palpitating  tissues  and  forbids  us  to  find  any- 
thing there  but  motion.  The  Bible  comes  boldly  to  the  light, 
and  postulates  everything  supernatural.  Looking  at  those 
same  tissues  it  sees  moving  there  a  Power  that  is  all  the  while 
reaching  in  from  a  higher  and  deeper  world.  Every  life,  every 
act,  every  energy,  is  a  spiritual  thing,  deriving  from  the  un- 
seen. And  if  we  ask  which  of  these  two,  science  or  Bible,  is  on 
the  truer  tack,  the  only  answer  is,  "By  their  fruits  ye  shall 
know  them."  Science  is  brought  to  the  verge  of  a  great  abyss, 
which  it  must  see  is  an  abyss  of  life,  which  yet  it  will  not  own 
to  be  an  abyss  of  light;  while  it  is  forced,  without  knowing 
what  it  says,  to  call  for  resurrection.  Society,  keyed  to  these 
self-limited  conceptions  of  science,  is  in  like  manner  beginning 
to  call  for  a  Superman.  The  Bible,  seeing  through  ages  and 
eons  from  the  beginning,  intrepidly  postulates  the  potency  of 
both,  nay,  writes  the  history  of  their  advent.  It  looks,  does 
it  not?  as  if  science  must  be  the  one  to  back  down;  it  must 
do  so,  it  would  seem,  in  order  rightly  to  explore  its  abyss  of 
life.  I  do  not  mean  that  it  must  cease  to  be  science,  or  even 
that  it  must  die  as  science  and  rise  again  as  religion.  In  ac- 
cepting more  faith,  it  must  exert  not  less  but  more  reason. 
It  must  betake  itself,  however,  to  a  more  fitting  apparatus  of 
search,  and  thus  become  a  truer  science,  more  tolerant  of  its 
own  vision,  without  dying  at  all;  must  rise  to  its  mighty  oc- 
casion, to  the  ideal  of  life  that  is  knocking  at  its  door. 

Ere  she  gain  her  Heavenly-best,  a  God  must  mingle  with 
the  game;  the  poet  who  wrote  this  was  still  thinking,  as  so 


ON   THE  LARGER   SCALE  33 

many  of  us  do,  of  some  irruption  of  divinity  farther  along, 
some  arbitrary  interference,  it  may  be,  to  stay  the  tendencies 
of  ruin  and  set  things  right.  The  crookedness  of  the  world  has 
got  on  his  nerves,  so  that  he  cannot  clearly  see  how  God  can 
be  in  it  now.  God  must  supposably  come  in  somehow  for  the 
finishing  touches  only,  or  perhaps  to  do  mending  and  cobbler 
work.  And  indeed  religion  too  has  figured  such  an  arbitrary 
irruption  in  its  interpretation  of  the  coming  of  Christ.  Nor 
would  we  deny  this  side  of  Christ's  work  to  the  Bible  con- 
ception. He  came  to  seek  and  to  save  that  which  was  lost; 
they  called  Him  Jesus  because  He  should  save  His  people  from 
their  sins.  What  I  wish  to  deny,  however,  is,  that  this  was 
in  any  sense  arbitrary,  an  irruption  from  without,  a  happy 
expedient,  an  afterthought.  In  other  words,  we  need  to  realize 
that  scripture  conceptions,  the  broad  cosmic  truths  which  the  * 
Bible  holds  in  solution,  are  working  on  a  larger  scale,  a  scale 
of  majestic  creation  and  evolution,  and  not  merely  a  scale  of 
repairing;  a  scale  as  large  as  the  whole  tract  of  time,  and  the 
whole  order  of  the  world,  and  the  whole  growth  of  man.  We 
shall  understand  the  coming  of  Christ  better,  I  hope,  and  what 
it  means,  as  we  go  on.  Meanwhile,  we  must  think  of  an  an- 
cient world  in  which  God  could  coexist  with  monsters  of  primi- 
tive form  and  creatures  "that  tare  each  other  in  their  slime"; 
just  as  we  have  to  think  of  a  modern  world  in  which,  though 
God  is  felt  as  present  bringing  to  pass  some  great  work,  He 
can  coexist  with  city  slums  and  boodle  politics  and  Siberian 
transportations  and  Russian  bomb-throwing.  The  game  has 
become  very  complex,  we  must  needs  admit.  A  very  compre- 
hensive conception  that  must  be,  which  can  compass  the  so- 
lution of  all  its  moves.  In  tracing  therefore  the  tremendous 
conceptions  of  a  Book  which  so  confidently  says,  "I  see  the 
end,  and  know  the  good,"  can  we  rightly  narrow  it  to  private 
interpretation?  Nay,  if  it  meets  the  huge  case  of  manhood  it 
must  be  read  in  broader  light. 

I  must  not  take  occasion  here  even  to  sketch  out  the  Bible 
description- of  this  spiritual  development,  as  from  its  starting- 
point  it  goes  through  many  obscure  stages,  a  dim  and  perilous 


34  THE   LIFE  INDEED 

way;  first  the  natural,  as  St.  Paul  puts  it,  afterward  the  spiri- 
tual. Some  notion  of  this  is  what  we  must  try  to  get  in  the 
pages  to  come. 

One  thing,  however,  must  be  noted  of  its  far  goal  of  resurrec- 
tion, that  evolutionary  culmination  which  eye  hath  not  seen 
nor  ear  heard.  That  is,  that  this  is  not  coordinated  with  the 
death  of  the  body,  as  if  all  that  a  man  had  to  do  in  order  to 
rise  were  to  do  what  he  cannot  help  doing,  namely,  to  die.  We 
must  dismiss  this  paltry  notion;  it  belongs  to  the  pettier  scale 
of  things.  When  the  resurrection  comes,  as  we  shall  see,  man 
is  vigorously  cooperating  with  it,  and  contributing  all  that  he 
is  to  it.  In  other  words,  the  resurrection  which  the  Bible  con- 
templates, in  the  spirit  and  essence  of  it,  begins  not  with  death 
but  with  birth,  what  the  Bible  calls  the  birth  of  the  spirit,  the 
birth  from  above.  That  may  take  place  here  on  earth,  before 
we  go  to  that  mysterious  realm  on  which  physical  death  ushers 
us.  The  life  and  immortality  send  their  heralds  before,  and 
come  to  light  at  a  calculable  point  in  history  and  in  individual 
life;  so  that  when  we  enter  the  beyond  we  are  already  citizens 
of  that  country  and  have  the  larger  light  of  it  within  us.  This 
fact,  as  we  see,  furnishes  a  definite  and  quasi-historic  field  for 
our  scientific  study.  We  do  not  have  to  employ  a  medium, 
or  wade  the  swamps  of  the  hypnotic  and  subconscious;  we  do 
not  have  to  leave  this  visible  world;  but  all  our  tract  of  re- 
search lies  in  the  wholesome  light  of  day.  Between  the  gloom 
of  the  nebulous  and  animal  stage  on  the  one  hand  and  the 
light  unapproachable  on  the  other  there  is  a  penumbra,  tem- 
pered to  our  earthly  eyesight,  which  we  may  explore,  and 
know  that  the  elements  we  find  there,  being  spiritual,  are  in 
truth  the  unseen  elements,  and  are  eternal.  We  can,  with  our 
sane  endowments  of  sense  and  reason,  follow  the  new  reach 
of  life  beyond  where  resurrection  begins,  far  enough  to  know 
what  are  its  essential  elements  in  any  time,  place,  or  state  of 
being;  we  can,  with  the  spirit  that  is  in  us,  test  it  fully  and 
taste  its  power.  In  short,  there  is  put  into  our  hands  the  true 
and  only  fitting  apparatus  of  search:  we  learn  to  know  the  life 
beyond  by  actually  living  it. 


ON   THE  LARGER  SCALE  35 

Such  is  a  hint  of  the  larger  scale  of  values  that  is  to  condi- 
tion our  reading  of  the  Bible  and  evolutionary  science;  not  to 
deny  or  discard  the  older  readings,  but  to  supplement  them 
according  to  the  idiom  in  which  we  have  learned  to  read  the 
world.  Before  I  leave  this  introductory  discussion,  however, 
two  remarks  may  be  appended,  about  the  study  we  are  here 
opening. 

For  one  thing,  I  am  not  asking  you,  my  reader,  to  take  my 
word  for  it,  as  if  I  were  making  religious  propaganda;  am  not 
even  stipulating  that  you  commit  yourself  to  what  the  Bible 
is  found  to  say.  I  am  merely  endeavoring  to  set  forth  what 
I  have  come  to  see  is  a  vast  cosmic  history  of  life,  hid  between 
the  covers  of  this  book;  and  if  my  exposition  of  it  introduces 
you  to  a  new  point  of  view,  unthought  of  before,  I  am  merely 
asking  you  to  treat  it  as  the  Bereans  treated  a  view  of  life 
new  to  them;  who  "received  the  word  with  all  readiness  of 
mind,  and  searched  the  Scriptures  daily,  whether  those  things 
were  so."  The  Bible  does  not  need  me  nor  any  one  else  to 
defend  it;  it  needs  no  championing  against  science  or  social 
arrangements;  it  needs  only  to  be  known  and  understood,  in 
the  spirit  of  it.  So  if  there  is  fallacy  or  inadequacy  in  any 
view  I  bring  you  here,  and  you  cannot  lay  it  on  me  as  inter- 
preter, lay  it  on  the  Bible.  And  if  there  is  a  great  enlarge- 
ment and  illumination  of  life  here,  and  a  self-evidencing  truth 
of  being,  ascribe  that  to  the  Bible  too,  not  at  all  to  me.  And 
as  for  receiving  it  as  true,  and  lifting  your  faith  up  to 
its  height,  and  living  by  it,  —  well,  that  is  your  affair.  It  will 
surely  do  no  one  harm.  Personally,  I  am  willing  to  accept  a 
life  so  revealed;  the  Bible  is  to  me  still,  in  spite  of  all  the 
monographs  of  science  and  philosophy,  the  real  text-book  of 
life. 

The  other  remark  is  this:  we  are  embarked  on  the  history 
of  the  coming  of  life  and  immortality  to  light.  To  what  light? 
may  be  asked.  To  the  light  of  man's  intellect  and  insight  and 
imagination  and  will.  In  other  words,  we  see  two  things  here 
confronting  each  other:  the  reality  of  being,  and  the  mind  of 
man.  Our  question  is  the  question  not  merely  of  what  is  real, 


36  THE  LIFE  TNDEED 

but  of  what  is  seen  as  real,  as  far  and  as  fast  as  men  have 
eyes  to  see.  That  is  to  say,  we  are  embarked  on  a  study  of 
men's  conceptions  of  things;  of  the  great  concept  of  life,  con- 
tributed to  by  many  minds,  in  many  ages,  yet  somehow  coales- 
cing into  one  unitary  concept,  which  puts  forth  shoots  from 
the  soil  of  elemental  manhood  and  blossoms  and  grows.  Now 
this,  as  we  see,  raises  us  to  a  region  above  the  choking  dust 
of  the  prevailing  historical  and  archeological  criticism;  if  it 
comes  to  a  date  when  the  record  was  not  clear,  and  so  needed 
interpolation  or  later  correcting,  it  has  but  to  wait  until  the 
insight  of  man  has  grown  a  little  larger,  and  the  tangled  lines 
are  straightened  out  farther  up.  It  does  not  choose  its  path 
low  enough  to  stumble  over  an  alleged  fact  because  a  later 
editor  supplied  it,  or  because  it  was  written  by  some  one  who 
posed  as  St.  John.  It  takes  what  the  Gospel  of  John  says  as 
representing  the  conception  of  life,  and  of  Christ's  contribu- 
tion to  it,  which  the  human  spirit  was  large  enough  to  grasp 
when  that  gospel  was  written.  So  large  a  view  of  life,  and  of 
such  tenor,  was  then  in  the  bosom  of  manhood;  it  could  then 
be  given  to  the  world  and  presumably  understood  by  them; 
the  generation  or  the  century  is  a  subordinate  consideration. 
This  is  the  reason  why  I  have  associated  this  broader  reading, 
this  enlargement  of  scale,  not  merely  with  scripture  facts  but 
with  scripture  conceptions.  The  history  is  an  inner  one,  a 
history  of  the  growth  of  the  spirit  of  man,  and  of  the  increasing 
light  that  attended  him  all  along  the  way. 


II 

THE  TWILIGHT   STRATUM 

HOW   THE    SOUL    OF   MANHOOD   FARES    IN   MORTAL 
ENVIRONMENT  AND   RUDIMENTAL   BEGINNINGS 

I.  THE  EMPIRE  OF  LAW  AND  FATE 

II.  THE  ADVENT  OF  THE  SPIRIT 

III.  EARLY  SPIRITUAL  REACTIONS 

IV.  THE  BURDEN  AND  THE  CRAVING 


II 

THE   TWILIGHT    STRATUM 

WHEN  the  sage  Koheleth,  looking  abroad  over  the 
world  both  of  things  and  of  men,  said,  "Every- 
thing hath  He  made  beautiful  in  its  time,  also  He 
hath  put  eternity  in  their  heart,"  he  was  living  consciously  in 
a  confused  and  cloudy  era,  was  speaking  out  of  the  heart  of 
a  twilight  stratum  of  personality,  which  indeed  he  recognized 
as  such.  The  finish  of  the  sentence  is,  "yet  not  so  that  man 
findeth  out  the  work  which  God  hath  wrought  from  the  begin- 
ning and  to  the  end."  He  sees  himself  midway  in  a  great  tide 
of  being,  of  which  the  beginning  and  the  end  puzzle  his  reason; 
but  there  is  a  power  urging  him  on  which  he  names  Eternity, 
and  which,  whatever  it  may  come  eventually  to  mean,  gives  all 
the  beauty  of  the  world  its  excuse  for  existing.  Not  a  mid- 
night this,  but  a  twilight,  wherein  there  is  light  enough  to  steer 
by,  and  wherein  already,  in  the  very  heart  of  it,  there  is  prom- 
ise of  a  coming  dawn.  A  friend  of  mine  has  lately  put  this 
thought  of  Koheleth's  into  the  familiar  metre  of  Omar  Khay- 
yam, extracting  thereby  its  fragrance  and  poetic  beauty:  — 

In  my  own  breast  beats  on  Eternity. 

No  mirage  towers  of  Dreamlands  yet  to  be, 

But  —  once  I  bent  to  taste  an  upland  spring 
And,  bending,  heard  it  whisper  of  its  Sea. 

I  shape  it  not  from  perishable  clay, 

Nor  muse  on  clouds  and  hope  to  make  them  stay, 

But  as  the  patient  shell  secretes  the  pearl 
So  I  secrete  my  Heaven  from  day  to  day. 

This  gentle  radiance  of  spiritual  illumination,  giving  every 
darkest  era  enough  light  to  live  and  find  its  destiny  by,  is  no 
more  and  no  less  than  the  Bible  elsewhere  avers.  It  does  not 

39 


4o  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

shun  the  most  seeming  hopeless  places.  St.  Paul,  looking 
straight  into  the  unspeakable  corruption  of  his  Roman  times, 
thus  describes  it:  "For  the  invisible  things  of  him  from  the 
creation  of  the  world  are  clearly  seen,  being  understood  by 
the  things  that  are  made,  even  his  eternal  power  and  God- 
head." This  is  not  a  mere  Jew-bounded  utterance,  for  he 
speaks  with  his  eye  on  all  the  Gentile  nations;  nor  is  it  a  truth 
of  manhood  alone,  for  his  purview  is  generous  enough  to  take 
in  the  world  of  things  as  well  as  of  men.  He  is  enunciating 
an  elemental  truth.  In  a  word,  our  scripture  period  of  evolu- 
tion not  only  begins  with  the  vitalizing  Spirit  of  God,  but  has 
the  nourishing  power  of  that  Spirit,  as  much  as  it  needs  and 
can  use,  all  along  the  way. 

Our  study,  it  will  be  borne  in  mind,  is  a  study  of  light: 
how  life  and  immortality  were  brought  to  light.  We  are  un- 
dertaking to  estimate  the  life  of  the  world,  in  its  various  eras, 
by  the  amount  and  nature  of  the  light  it  had  to  grow  by. 
Light,  so  to  say,  is  our  testing  and  measuring  instrument.  Let 
us,  in  imitation  of  our  scientific  brothers,  call  it  by  an  appro- 
priate Greek  name,  our  biometer.  We  may  begin  with  the 
twilight;  we  need  go  no  farther  back,  because,  as  we  have 
just  seen,  our  scripture  estimate  recognizes  no  absolute  dark- 
ness. I  have  called  this  initial  period  the  twilight  stratum, 
instead  of  the  twilight  era.  We  get  into  the  way,  overmuch 
perhaps,  of  judging  things  according  to  the  limiting  conditions 
of  time.  We  must  in  a  measure  discard  that  here.  The  tides 
of  the  informing  spirit,  we  need  to  premise,  are  flowing  through 
a  hidden  history  wherein  the  bounds  of  space  and  time  are 
lost,  wherein  one  day  is  as  a  thousand  years  and  a  thousand 
years  are  as  one  day.  So  instead  of  saying  there  was  a  time 
when  life  lay  in  twilight,  we  had  better  say  there  is  a  stratum, 
a  level,  in  human  nature,  existing  as  truly  to-day  as  it  ever  did, 
wherein  the  soul  moves  in  twilight  dimness,  seeing  as  through 
a  glass  darkly.  We  are  not  dealing,  therefore,  with  ancient 
history,  some  long  past  analogy  which  we  translate  into  terms 
of  to-day;  we  are  dealing  with  the  thing  itself,  literal  and 
present.  We  do  not  even  have  to  go  to  the  Turks  and  Bui- 


THE   TWILIGHT  STRATUM  41 

garians  to  find  it;  rather ,  from  our  purest  heights  of  vision 
we  can  all  look  down  into  ourselves  and  see  there  levels  and 
standards  of  living  which,  unless  illumined  from  above,  yield 
only  dimness  of  outlook.  The  abysms  of  our  nature  are  all 
there  still,  the  underworld  of  crude  instinct  and  earthly  re- 
sponse to  environment.  We  never  get  so  far  above  this  but 
that  there  come  up  echoes,  however  faint  and  far,  of  the  "call 
of  the  wild."  We  may  have  risen  above  the  tyranny  of  such 
things,  but  if  so  we  have  absorbed  them,  not  abolished  them. 
Or  we  may  figure  it  scientifically,  as  soon  as  we  see  in  man 
a  being  in  process  of  evolution.  The  embryonic  life  of  the 
body,  they  say,  passes  in  swift  epitome  through  the  inchoate 
stages  of  nature:  it  is  a  unicellular  germ,  it  breaks  up  by 
fission,  is  a  vegetable,  a  sponge,  a  fish-like  organism,  succes- 
sively, before  it  takes  on  any  semblance  of  man.  Is  the  case 
less  true  of  the  embryonic  life  of  the  spirit?  Must  not  it  too 
have  its  period  of  development  in  bondage  and  immaturity  and 
dimness,  before  it  can  see  its  parent  Spirit  as  He  is,  and  be- 
fore it  can  see  whither  it  is  bound?  Well,  this  embryonic 
period  is  the  twilight  stratum  of  manhood,  the  level  of  life 
wherein  by  the  nature  of  the  case,  the  immortal  outlook  is  not 
yet  in  sight. 

Of  this  spiritual  evolution  of  ours  we  have  already  become 
aware,  doubtless,  of  another  differentiating  trait;  it  is  con- 
noted by  the  fact  that  manhood,  when  the  Bible  first  sees  it, 
has  already  won  to  the  region  of  twilight  and  is  no  longer 
moving  in  utter  gloom.  Evolution,  in  its  lower  biologic  stages, 
is  figured  as  a  blind  fate-like  thing,  wherein  the  organism  is 
wholly  unconscious  and  passive,  acted  upon  by  mysterious 
forces  which  it  cannot  control  or  understand.  The  highest 
name  that  can  be  given  to  its  motions  is  natural  selection;  the 
highest  motive,  survival  of  the  fittest.  That  is  the  way  evolu- 
tion looks,  and  that  may  indeed  be  an  incident  of  its  rudi- 
mental  stage;  though,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  we  cannot  tell  how 
far  down  consciousness  begins,  or  how  soon  a  spiritual  im- 
pulse strikes  into  the  game,  and  there  are  even  those  who  think 
that  all  nature  is  alive,  each  thing  with  will  and  consciousness 


42  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

enough  to  fulfil  its  appointed  function.  With  these  specula- 
tions, however,  we  have  nothing  to  do.  We  stand  on  plainer 
ground.  In  the  stage  to  which  we  have  attained,  evolution  is 
in  progress  in  a  being  already  endowed  with  reason  and  a  will 
of  his  own;  a  being  of  whom  the  quaint  Bible  record  says, 
"And  the  Lord  God  formed  man  of  the  dust  of  the  ground, 
and  breathed  into  his  nostrils  the  breath  of  life,  and  man  be- 
came a  living  soul."  In  him  therefore  evolution  has  gained 
the  self-conscious  stage:  has  reached  the  point  where  the  or- 
ganism, no  longer  mere  passive  clay,  no  longer  even  an  un- 
sharing  spectator  from  without,  can  see  its  life  from  within; 
can  cast  itself  intelligently  on  life,  and  cooperate  in  its  own 
development.  So  much  outfit  of  life  it  has,  though  still  in 
twilight.  This  is  a  very  momentous  element  of  the  case. 
From  this  point  onward,  then,  evolution  is  no  longer  a  blind 
and  arbitrary  thing,  but  increasingly  charged  with  wisdom  and 
light.  Already,  too,  it  is  deeply  prophetic  of  its  august  goal, 
in  the  fact  that  it  can  share,  in  all  its  wealth  of  mind  and  ideal 
and  will,  in  the  mind  of  the  Father  of  spirits  from  whom  it 
conies.  The  organism  now  being  evolved  is  a  thinking  or- 
ganism. Its  moulding  power  still  comes,  as  absolutely  as  ever, 
from  the  mysterious  Reality  without;  but  its  light  comes  from 
within,  or  rather  by  way  of  the  manhood  spirit  within. 

We  must  speak  now  in  nobler  terms  than  we  apply  to  crys- 
tals and  germ-cells;  in  terms  of  personality.  For  while  the 
progressive  discovery  of  the  path  of  life  may  still  be  like  obey- 
ing nature  forces,  like  the  fire  ascending  to  seek  the  sun,  or  the 
magnetic  needle  vibrating  loyally  to  the  great  earth-currents 
of  the  pole,  yet  it  expresses  itself  in  the  idiom  of  free  strong 
manhood:  it  is  the  son  seeking  the  Father  and  the  ways  of  the 
Father's  home,  and  the  glory  of  the  family  likeness.  This  it 
truly  is,  however  for  a  time  it  may  stumble  among  dark  moun- 
tains, or  render  a  dim  and  wavering  allegiance,  or  even  by  its 
own  will  incur  bondage  to  the  conditions  of  its  existence.  For 
its  twilight  is  gradually  brightening  toward  day;  its  ordered 
steps  are  leading  in  the  direction  of  freedom. 


THE  TWILIGHT  STRATUM  43 


I.      THE    EMPIRE    OF    LAW    AND    FATE 

We  are  now  ready  to  consider  what  the  Bible  conceives  to 
be  the  essential  character  of  this  twilight  stratum  of  life.  A 
late  scripture  writer,  tracing  the  expression  of  this  to  a  com- 
manding personage,  and  to  its  national  aspect,  says,  "The 
law  was  given  by  Moses,"  -  by  law  meaning  the  whole  com- 
prehensive dispensation  before  his  time,  as  it  is  interpreted 
from  an  era  of  greater  light.  On  our  cosmic  scale,  which  in 
spite  of  its  racial  unit  is  truly  the  scale  of  the  Bible,  we  may 
call  this  the  empire  of  law  and  fate.  It  is  just  the  thing  that 
is  most  plainly  and  universally  before  us,  saints  and  scientists 
alike:  the  human  soul,  which  never  asked  or  chose  to  be 
breathed  into  earthly  life,  pursuing  its  activities  here  a  little 
while,  and  finding  out  the  principles  and  order  of  them,  then 
suddenly,  without  will  of  its  own,  disappearing  into  the  unseen 
again.  It  is  the  most  elemental  picture  that  man  can  draw  of 
his  own  mortal  existence:  the  background  on  which  all  the 
colors  and  shadings  of  life  appear.  That  this  compendious 
assessment  of  life  is  reduced  to  the  term  law,  and  that  this 
law,  however  rudimentally  revealed,  becomes  a  reign  of  law, 
and  empire  over  all  the  centres  and  outlying  provinces  of 
human  nature,  is  not  only  a  deduction  of  science,  a  matter  of 
pride  for  these  latter  days;  it  is  the  recognized  commonplace 
of  Scripture,  by  which  its  large  record  of  life  is  defined  in  two 
coordinated  and  correlated  halves.  If  the  higher  and  illumi- 
nate hemisphere  of  life  is  grace  and  truth,  as  these  came  by 
Jesus  Christ,  no  less  truly  its  lower  and  basal  hemisphere  is 
law,  as  this  is  identified  with  Moses.  In  other  words,  this 
was  the  essential  character  of  what  we  call  the  Old  Testament 
dispensation;  distinguishing  it  from,  and  perhaps  contrasting 
it  to,  what  a  deep-seeing  later  thinker  called  "the  dispensation 
of  the  fulness  of  times." 

That  this  empire  of  law  coincides  with  a  twilight  stratum 
of  life  is  indicated  historically  by  the  fact  that  the  Old  Testa- 
ment man,  from  his  determining  standard  of  law,  has  not  yet 


44  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

discovered  immortality,  except  as  a  vague  longing  and  dread. 
The  life  beyond,  to  him,  is  not  a  motive  and  inspiration,  but 
an  enigma;  is  not  really  a  life  at  all,  but  a  sort  of  punctuation 
mark  to  earth,  a  virtual  stoppage  and  negation  of  life;  which 
at  its  sternest  is  figured  as  an  austere  paying-off  of  old  scores 
in  the  coin  of  rewards  and  punishments,  and  at  its  mercifulest 
does  not  get  beyond  the  idea  of  release  and  rest.  Under  this 
law  empire  the  human  soul  is,  so  to  say,  caught  and  tamed;  is 
brought  under  the  all-encompassing  domination,  I  had  almost 
said  tyranny,  of  prescription  and  prohibition.  And  as  long 
as  he  is  there  he  is  not  consciously  the  son  of  God,  but  the 
slave  and  culprit  of  God,  who  can  hardly  choose  but  err,  or 
the  puppet  of  God,  moved  by  the  unchosen  strings  of  his 
being's  law.  It  is  best  not  to  mince  matters  here:  this,  re- 
duced to  lowest  terms,  is  the  real  state  of  the  case.  No  doubt 
it  is  right;  I  dare  say  it  ought  to  be  so;  at  any  rate  it  is  so. 
The  empire  of  law  becomes  an  empire  of  fate,  which  the 
thought  of  another  life,  turned  back  in  recompense  or  retri- 
bution on  this,  only  accentuates. 

I  hardly  need  pause  here  to  say,  that  in  this  matter  we  are 
simply  following,  at  a  somewhat  higher  level,  the  ascertained 
order  of  nature.  If  there  is  any  one  thing  that  has  become 
thoroughly  ingrained  in  men's  minds,  as  the  fruit  of  the  scien- 
tific movement  of  the  last  century,  that  has  been  made  the 
corner-stone  and  basis  of  all  the  rest,  it  is  the  idea  that  we 
are  living  under  an  all-encompassing,  inexorable  empire  of  law. 
It  is  just  this  idea  that  has  made  us  so  nervous  about  miracles 
and  the  supernatural  or  extra-natural;  filling,  as  it  does,  the 
universe  so  full  that  there  seems  no  room  for  anything  else. 
It  has  got  into  literature  as  intolerantly  as  into  science:  we 
are  impatient  of  things  like  the  Arabian  Nights  and  Gulliver's 
Travels,  which  deal  with  freaks  and  marvels,  and  relegate 
these  to  the  nursery  where  fairy  tales  are  more  in  order ;  while 
even  there  the  children  are  learning  to  say,  "Of  course  it  isn't 
so,  the  author  just  said  so."  Everywhere  we  are  adjusting 
ourselves,  have  adjusted  ourselves,  to  a  reign  of  law.  And 
everywhere,  too,  we  have,  in  spite  of  ourselves,  very  largely 


THE   TWILIGHT  STRATUM  45 

conformed  our  imagination  to  a  reign  of  fate,  wherein,  always 
at  an  untimely  moment, 

Comes  the  blind  Fury  with  the  abhorred  shears, 
And  slits  the  thin-spun  life. 

That  is  why  the  idea  of  immortality  still  persists  as  a  longing 
and  a  dread,  or  at  highest  as  a  safety  and  a  rest,  but  not  really 
as  a  life,  or  as  a  welcomed  birth  to  nobler  things.  One  thinks 
of  the  vague  fears  and  apprehensions  that  connect  themselves 
with  accidents  and  catastrophes  of  nature,  and  chances  of 
sudden  death,  as  if  all  beyond  our  control  were  chaotic  and 
unordered ;  and  then  one  thinks,  by  contrast,  of  that  Man  who 
sailed  our  earthly  seas,  and  who,  when  the  storm  was  fiercest 
and  disciples  were  frantic  with  terror,  was  quietly  asleep  on  a 
pillow.  The  contrast  goes  deep.  It  takes  hold  of  the  roots 
of  life.  We  cannot  reason  it  away;  our  emancipation  from 
such  fears  must  come  quite  otherwise;  and  the  large  scripture 
way  is  the  only  way  to  bring  it  about;  it  comes,  so  to  say,  only 
by  the  way  of  the  Son  of  man.  Still,  quite  apart  from  the 
proof  or  illustration  of  it,  the  deep  contrast  remains:  a  con- 
trast in  mood,  attitude,  tone,  between  the  soul  consciously  sub- 
ject to  unchosen  law  and  blind  fate,  and  the  soul  consciously 
sharing  life  with  the  Wisdom  and  Spirit  of  the  universe.  And 
this  is  what,  in  the  sequel  of  our  study,  the  contrast  will 
amount  to.  It  is  the  unforced  consciousness  of  things,  the 
spirit  oppressed  or  hopeful,  that  counts  in  life,  not  the  labored 
logic  by  which  we  try  to  persuade  our  minds.  We  shall  follow 
life  to  the  point  where,  in  the  face  of  storm  and  mystery,  it 
can  calmly  rest  its  head  on  a  pillow;  can  bask,  as  it  were,  in 
the  light  to  which  it  has  won,  knowing  that  all  is  well. 

But  we  must  traverse  a  twilight  period  first,  just  as  also 
nature  must.  And  the  felt  empire  of  law  and  fate,  which  gives 
tone  to  that  period,  is  a  sound  and  sturdy  stratum  of  life;  it 
develops  the  principle,  the  stamina,  the  strong  fibre,  by  which 
the  soul  can  do  its  work  in  the  world,  and  build  its  ideals  of 
character.  It  learns  to  love  its  reign  of  law,  and  it  lays  its 
foundations  deep  beneath  the  surface;  and  though  it  moves 
in  dimness  of  outlook,  yet  the  night  has  its  stars  and  its 


46  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

brightening  East,  and  God  gives  it  also  songs  in  the  night  and 
compensating  joys. 

It  would  be  very  interesting,  if  we  had  the  space,  to  follow 
into  detail  the  dominance  of  law,  gradually  widening  and 
deepening,  from  its  rudimental  beginnings  to  the  darkest  hour 
of  its  twilight,  just  before  the  dawn.  All  we  can  do,  however, 
is  to  touch  on  a  few  salient  points.  The  Hebrew  word  for  law, 
torah,  did  not  to  begin  with  have  just  the  meaning  that  we 
have  come  to  attribute  to  the  term,  when  we  speak,  for  in- 
stance, of  English  law,  or  of  the  laws  of  nature;  though  it  did 
approach  the  modern  meaning  afterward,  as  it  was  seen  to 
cover  more  of  life  and  the  world.  We  have  divested  it  of  per- 
sonality; it  has  become  to  our  consciousness  a  sort  of  mechan- 
ical thing,  a  fate,  which  renders  no  account  of  itself.  With  the 
Hebrew,  on  the  contrary,  the  personal  origin  of  law  was  of 
its  very  essence;  in  his  mind  to  legislate,  to  give  torah  as  he 
expressed  it,  meant  nearly  the  same  as  to  give  orders  or  in- 
struction, as  a  general  gives  orders  to  his  army,  or  as  a  teacher 
gives  instruction  to  his  class.  Further,  its  ultimate  source  was 
always  thought  of  as  God  Himself;  the  form  it  took  in  the 
mouth  of  lawgiver  or  priest  or  prophet  never  dispelled  this 
idea;  and  accordingly,  to  the  end  of  the  chapter,  the  authority 
of  law,  torah,  was  accepted  as  absolute.  That  is,  the  personal 
will  of  God  was  to  the  Hebrew  practically  the  same  as  the 
order  of  nature  is  to  us;  and  his  personality,  in  following  that 
will,  went  through  a  development  quite  analogous  to  what  we 
recognize  in  our  bodies,  in  the  laws  of  evolution,  heredity, 
growth,  and  indeed,  when  we  understand  his  quaint  but  semi- 
nal Hebrew  idiom,  identical  with  what  we  trace  in  the  human 
mind,  in  basal  rudiments,  customs,  institutions,  history.  Time 
fails  me,  of  course,  to  enlarge  on  this,  as  given  in  the  Old  Tes- 
tament; but  it  is  all  there,  and  all  in  a  natural  and  self -evi- 
dencing order.  It  seems  to  have  been  the  world  mission  of 
the  Semitic  race,  as  Professor  McCurdy  points  out,  to  furnish 
the  type,  the  norm  of  things,  for  the  Aryan  race  to  take  up 
and  fill  out  in  arts  and  civilization.  "In  nearly  everything 
vital  to  human  well-being,"  he  says,  "the  Semites  were  the 


THE   rWILIGHr  STRATUM  47 

founders  or  forerunners."  And  the  seminal  principles  of  life, 
the  pioneer  impulses,  are  best  depicted  in  this  book  of  theirs, 
which  just  on  that  account  has  become  the  Bible  of  the  edu- 
cated and  civilized  world. 

We  speak,  in  biology,  of  the  law  of  the  species,  that  rigid 
law  by  which  every  animal  instinctively  conforms  to  the  ways 
of  its  kind.  A  blind  law,  our  thoughts  make  this,  a  law  which 
the  animal  has  no  mind  to  reason  out,  and  no  choice  but  to 
obey.  Well,  the  Hebrew  law  was  just  a  kind  of  magnified  law 
of  the  species;  only,  being  personal  and  conscious,  he  went 
into  it  with  his  eyes  open;  and  its  appeal  was  always  made 
to  his  reason  as  well  as  to  his  instinct.  In  other  words,  from 
the  very  beginning  he  was  expected  and  encouraged  to  co- 
operate with  it.  There  was  a  two- fold  element  in  it;  and  the 
power  of  two  worlds,  the  austere  under-world  of  his  primordial 
nature,  and  the  free  upper-world  of  his  manhood.  But  for  the 
rest,  he  never  got  beyond  the  tether  of  his  species  conscious- 
ness. He  merely  spread  it  out  into  wider  areas:  from  the 
family,  taking  its  law  from  a  patriarchal  head,  to  the  clan, 
Isaac  and  Ishmael,  Jacob  and  Esau;  then  to  the  tribe,  tracing 
up  allegiance  to  a  common  ancestor ;  then  through  slavery  and 
deliverance  and  conquest  to  the  nation,  which  for  the  first  time 
could  begin  to  legislate  and  write  its  laws  for  permanent  use, 
on  stone;  then  finally,  as  nationality  failed,  to  a  race.  That  is 
as  far  as  the  Hebrew,  as  such,  ever  got.  To  this  day  the 
Hebrews  remain  a  race  apart,  with  an  intense,  exclusive,  al- 
most fanatical  race  consciousness,  virtually  the  species  con- 
sciousness writ  large.  It  remained  for  the  Aryan  race  to  take 
up  the  matter  where  they  laid  it  down,  and  develop  the  re- 
gards of  men  from  Judaism  to  Christianity,  from  the  nation 
and  the  race  to  the  world  and  the  universal  humanity.  They 
might  indeed  have  done  this,  and  their  Pioneer,  of  their  own 
royal  line,  was  ready;  if  they  had  not,  in  an  evil  hour,  per- 
versely chosen  to  reject  Him,  and  thus  commit  their  manhood 
to  an  arrested  development.  The  result  is  before  us,  for  the 
world  to  see;  the  enlarging  humanitarian  consciousness  of  our 
latest  age  is  every  day  making  it  plainer. 


48  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

But  to  go  back  to  the  spirit  of  their  old  law.  Its  main  effort 
and  impact,  as  you  know,  was  prohibition  and  restraint:  al- 
ways directed  to  curbing  and  bringing  into  order  the  imperious 
surge  of  the  natural  man  toward  lawless  freedom.  It  took 
men  as  we  take  children,  saying,  "You  mustn't  do  this,  you 
mustn't  touch  that,  you  mustn't."  You  have  noted  how  all 
the  commandments  of  the  two  tables,  except  one,  are  prohibi- 
tions, "Thou  shalt  not";  they  recognize  the  things  to  which 
men  too  naturally  tend,  and  put  the  bridle  there.  "Ye  shall 
not  do,"  said  Moses  to  them  at  the  outer  edge  of  the  wilderness, 
"ye  shalt  not  do  after  all  the  things  that  we  do  here  this  day, 
every  man  whatsoever  is  right  in  his  own  eyes."  It  was  a 
kind  of  negative  life  that  was  thus  contemplated.  We  can 
imagine  some  progressive  minded  man  in  his  audience  break- 
ing in  here  and  saying,  "You  have  told  us  what  not  to  do,  but 
when  we  have  obeyed  your  prohibitions  to  the  full  where  are 
we  then?  What  shall  we  do?  How  shall  we  take  this  tabula 
rasa  of  a  life  and  enrich  it?  The  decks  are  cleared  for  action, 
all  the  clutter  and  impedimenta  removed  by  your  'Thou  shalt 
nots';  now  where  is  the  foe  to  fight,  where  is  the  victory  to 
win?  All  that  you  have  left  us  positively  to  do,  barring  some 
ceremonies  and  sanitary  rules,  is  to  honor  our  fathers  and 
mothers;  but  we  must  be  fathers  and  mothers  some  day;  how 
then  shall  we  in  turn  be  ourselves  worthy  of  honor,  and  es- 
pecially in  the  new  conditions  of  action  that  times  will  surely 
bring?"  Well,  that  was  left  to  the  future,  to  the  time  when 
they  would  be  out  of  the  wilderness,  and  be  no  longer 
scolded  children  but  full-grown  men,  adult  and  ready  to  act 
for  themselves.  "For  ye  are  not  as  yet  come,"  said  the  ven- 
erable lawgiver,  "to  the  rest  and  to  the  inheritance  which  the 
Lord  your  God  giveth  you."  His  law  was  made  for  a  con- 
sciously unfinal  stage  of  manhood;  and  so  it  remained  to  the 
end,  not  because  it  was  inadequate  or  unwise  or  not  volumi- 
nous enough,  but  precisely  because  it  was  law.  The  law,  the 
police  regulation  of  the  world,  operates  to  protect  society  and 
keep  men  out  of  —  or  put  them  into  —  jail;  but  what  life, 
what  ideal,  what  spiritual  energy,  does  it,  as  law,  put  within 


THE   TWILIGHT  STRATUM  49 

them?  Clearly,  it  represents  only  the  negative  half  of  a  di- 
vided whole;  and  all  that  makes  positive  manhood,  according 
to  the  Maker's  image,  is  beyond. 

From  these  rudiments  of  law,  wherein  we  see  men  just  going 
under  the  yoke,  our  thoughts  go  out  to  an  empire  of  law, 
wherein  a  universe  is  caught  and  tamed;  we  try  to  think  what 
the  world  would  be  like  if  it  were  what  the  biologists  want  it 
to  be,  a  world  of  law  and  nothing  else.  We  look  into  the 
animal  world,  which  God  created  and  called  very  good;  and 
there  we  note  the  species,  each  in  its  own  compartment  of  na- 
ture, each  with  its  species  consciousness  and  obeying  its  species 
law.  What  do  these  different  species,  all  from  one  Creator, 
do?  They  fear  one  another;  they  fight  one  another;  they 
devour  one  another.  There  seems  to  be  a  law  in  their  members 
impelling  them  to  it.  Poets  have  brooded  over  it,  as  if  the 
world  were  radically  cruel  and  unfeeling;  they  call  it  "nature 
red  in  tooth  and  claw."  And  yet  all  this  seems  mellow  music 
compared  with  what  goes  on  all  the  while  among  us.  The 
law  of  our  digestive  organs  calls  for  animal  food;  and  what 
is  that  army  of  our  species  out  there  in  the  Chicago  shambles 
doing  all  day  long,  and  year  after  year,  but  kill,  kill,  kill,  — 
that  we  may  eat  the  flesh?  Or  if  we  have  scruples  against 
such  slaughter,  and,  choosing  rather  to  be  underfed  and 
anaemic,  confine  ourselves  to  vegetable  food,  we  have  only  re- 
moved the  matter  one  step  back,  we  are  still  destroying  the 
protoplasmic  life  of  lower  creatures  to  build  up  our  own  bodies. 
The  law  in  our  members,  the  law  of  our  species,  demands  it; 
there  seems  to  be  no  consideration  of  mercy  or  sympathy  or 
even  justice  in  the  matter.  It  is  all  unrelieved  law:  nature 
preserving  her  integrity  and  uniformity,  calm  and  severe,  yet 
beneath  the  surface  full  of  fear  and  fighting  and  devouring. 

Is  it  essentially  different  when  we  come  to  the  domain  of 
the  higher  law,  as  unrelieved  law  I  mean,  with  its  rigid  stand- 
ards on  the  one  hand,  its  atmosphere  of  bondage  and  restraint 
on  the  other?  What  sort  of  world  would  this  be  if  the  Old 
Testament  dispensation  had  been  perpetual,  and  had  remained 
unrelieved  by  more  genial  elements,  that  magnified  law  of  the 


50  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

species  of  which  I  was  speaking  a  few  minutes  ago?  Well, 
we  have  a  historical  example,  in  our  own  modern  times,  to 
illustrate  it  for  us.  We  honor  the  Puritans,  and  trace  much 
of  our  noblest  and  strongest  convictions  of  right  and  conscience 
to  them.  But  once  in  their  history  they  got  their  doctrines 
and  sentiments  a  little  out  of  balance,  and  reverted  overmuch 
to  the  earlier  ways,  when  the  reign  of  Mosaic  law  was  unre- 
lieved by  grace  and  truth.  This  is  how  Macaulay  describes 
it: 

"After  the  fashion  of  oppressed  sects,  they  mistook  their 
own  vindictive  feelings  for  emotions  of  piety,  encouraged  in 
themselves  by  reading  and  meditation  a  disposition  to  brood 
over  their  wrongs,  and,  when  they  had  worked  themselves  up 
into  hating  their  enemies,  imagined  that  they  were  only  hating 
the  enemies  of  heaven.  In  the  New  Testament  there  was  little 
indeed  which,  even  when  perverted  by  the  most  disingenuous 
exposition,  could  seem  to  countenance  the  indulgence  of  male- 
volent passions.  But  the  Old  Testament  contained  the  history 
of  a  race  selected  by  God  to  be  witnesses  of  his  unity  and  min- 
isters of  his  vengeance,  and  specially  commanded  by  him  to 
do  many  things  which,  if  done  without  his  special  command, 
would  have  been  atrocious  crimes.  In  such  a  history  it  was 
not  difficult  for  fierce  and  gloomy  spirits  to  find  much  that 
might  be  distorted  to  suit  their  wishes.  The  extreme  Puritans 
therefore  began  to  feel  for  the  Old  Testament  a  preference, 
which,  perhaps,  they  did  not  distinctly  avow  even  to  them- 
selves; but  which  showed  itself  in  all  their  sentiments  and 
habits.  They  paid  to  the  Hebrew  language  a  respect  which 
they  refused  to  that  tongue  in  which  the  discourses  of  Jesus 
and  the  epistles  of  Paul  have  come  down  to  us.  They  baptized 
their  children  by  the  names,  not  of  Christian  saints,  but  of 
Hebrew  patriarchs  and  warriors.  In  defiance  of  the  express 
and  reiterated  declarations  of  Luther  and  Calvin,  they  turned 
the  weekly  festival  by  which  the  Church  had,  from  the  primi- 
tive times,  commemorated  the  resurrection  of  her  Lord,  into 
a  Jewish  Sabbath.  They  sought  for  principles  of  jurispru- 
dence in  the  Mosaic  law,  and  for  precedents  to  guide  their 


THE   TWILIGHT  STRATUM  51 

ordinary  conduct  in  the  books  of  Judges  and  Kings.  Their 
thoughts  and  discourse  ran  much  on  acts  which  were  assuredly 
not  recorded  as  examples  for  our  imitation.  The  prophet  who 
hewed  in  pieces  a  captive  king,  the  rebel  general  who  gave  the 
blood  of  a  queen  to  the  dogs,  the  matron  who,  in  defiance  of 
plighted  faith,  and  of  the  laws  of  eastern  hospitality,  drove 
the  nail  into  the  brain  of  the  fugitive  ally  who  had  just  fed  at 
her  board,  and  who  was  sleeping  under  the  shadow  of  her  tent, 
were  proposed  as  models  to  Christians  suffering  under  the 
tyranny  of  princes  and  prelates.  Morals  and  manners  were 
subjected  to  a  code  resembling  that  of  the  synagogue,  when 
the  synagogue  was  in  its  worst  state." 

A  trenchant  indictment  this;  we  leave  out  of  the  question 
whether  Macaulay  exaggerated  it,  or  left  it  too  one-sided. 
What  we  are  to  note  here  is  that  this  describes  not  merely  an 
era  in  history  but  a  stratum  of  human  nature.  What  is  all 
this  but  a  reversion  to  the  twilight  stratum?  Given  such 
and  such  conditions,  let  the  prevailing  sentiment,  even  the 
sacred  zeal  of  divine  law,  be  too  unrelieved  and  too  intolerant, 
and  the  Puritan  of  the  seventeenth  century  after  Christ  be- 
comes at  heart  like  the  Jew  of  the  prechristian  centuries;  he 
has  magnified  that  law  of  the  species  and  of  the  race  until  he 
can  hardly  let  other  species  and  races  exist,  or  at  least  can 
hardly  let  exist  what  they  stand  for  and  what  perhaps  has  been 
bred  in  the  law  of  their  being. 

Yet  all  this  time  Jews  and  Puritans  alike  have,  as  St.  Paul 
says,  consented  to  the  law  that  it  is  holy  and  just  and  good; 
have  rejoiced  in  it  after  the  inward  man.  The  empire  of  law 
has  engendered  ideals;  nay  the  ideal  of  its  own  perfection  and 
universality,  the  ideal  of  its  sacredness  and  unsearchable 
depth,  was  at  the  bottom  of  that  Puritan  intolerance  and  nar- 
rowness. The  very  law  of  the  species,  with  its  fear  and  its 
fighting,  is  ideally  the  integrity  of  the  species.  All  the  ideals 
of  character  that  rose  in  the  mind  of  the  Old  Testament 
worthies  merely  reflected  this  fact  at  different  sides  and  angles. 
The  stern  yet  tonic  ideal  of  duty,  what  is  this  but  giving  every 
obligation,  every  responsibility,  every  law  of  our  being,  its 


52  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

just  due?  The  comprehensive  ideal  of  righteousness  again, 
which  is  the  high  summit  to  which  Old  Testament  conduct 
tends,  what  is  this?  "In  this  word  righteousness,"  says 
Brierly,  " .  .  .we  need  beware  lest  we  take  an  emotional  sub- 
stitute for  the  actual  meaning.  For,  in  heaven  and  upon  earth, 
it  has  only  one  meaning,  Tightness,  which  again  means  always 
conformity  to  the  law  of  things.  In  all  her  myriad  depart- 
ments, Nature  has  one  rule  of  conduct  towards  us.  She  pays 
according  to  our  conformity  to  her  law."  In  this  ideal,  then, 
we  have  merely  the  law  of  great  nature  writ  large,  and  made 
into  an  empire  over  our  sturdiest  and  severest  character.  God 
Himself,  too,  is  a  God  of  righteousness;  He  embodies  His  own 
law.  Or  take  the  highest  ideal  of  all,  remote,  withdrawn,  the 
ideal  that  mystics  have  appropriated  to  themselves  and  that 
seems  inaccessible  to  common  and  lay  humanity,  —  the  ideal 
of  holiness.  "This  latter  word,"  says  Brierly  again,  "we  now 
recognize  as  signifying  neither  less  nor  more  than  'wholeness.' 
It  means  the  full  equipment  of  manhood,  the  highest  state  of 
body,  soul,  and  spirit."  Well,  what  is  being  a  whole  man,  but 
having  all  the  functions  in  vital  running  order,  rejoicing  to 
obey  the  laws  of  their  being?  The  empire  of  law  creates  a 
demand  for  its  own  perfection;  it  is  inexorable,  intolerant  if 
you  please;  it  will  not  be  satisfied  until  it  has  drawn  into  its 
jurisdiction  the  whole  man  and  every  man. 

And  yet  at  its  highest  and  holiest,  the  empire  of  law,  as  such, 
is  still  in  the  twilight  stratum;  it  has  not  the  light  and  life  of 
the  hemisphere  beyond  itself.  I  am  not  saying  this  to  bring 
an  indictment  against  law,  or  to  intimate  that  the  twilight 
stratum  is  therefore  evil.  I  am  optimistic  enough  to  believe, 
as  I  look  the  field  of  truth  over,  that  things  come  to  light  just 
about  as  fast  as  they  ought  to,  and  on  the  whole  just  about  in 
the  order  they  ought  to.  You  see,  the  great  body  of  humanity 
is  an  inert  thing,  and  stubbornly  conservative;  a  huge  mass  to 
move  forward  through  life;  and  every  step  of  progress  has  to 
be  naturalized,  to  be  trodden  in,  until  it  becomes  the  posses- 
sion not  of  the  philosopher  or  illuminated  prophet  alone,  but 
of  the  community,  of  the  rank  and  file;  and  it  has  to  become 


THE   TWILIGHT  STRATUM  53 

an  atmosphere,  which  men  breathe  without  thinking,  or  a  sun- 
light, which  warms  and  guides  men  while  they  do  not  realize 
its  meaning  or  power.  We  must  judge  humanity  by  its  ele- 
mental endowments,  and  by  the  light  which  has  become  ele- 
mental within  them. 

To  say,  then,  that  while  our  nature  is  still  under  unrelieved 
law  it  is  still  in  twilight,  and  cannot  see  the  immortal  dawn 
beyond,  is  merely  to  say  that  law  can  only  move  in  its  own 
orbit  until  it  comes  round  full  circle,  can  only  contemplate  its 
own  completion,  and  that  until  this  is  accomplished  cannot 
take  up,  cannot  even  see,  the  next  and  risen  stage  of  being. 
Consider  the  case.  We  will  suppose  that  a  man  has  walked 
in  all  the  statutes  of  the  law  blameless,  that  according  to  the 
"most  strictest"  sect  of  Hebraism  he  has,  like  Job,  to  appear 
proudly  before  his  Maker  with  his  record  on  his  shoulder. 
What  then?  Why,  he  gets  his  award.  Judgment  is  passed  upon 
him,  the  just  verdict  is  rendered  for  what  he  is  and  has  been. 
Or  suppose,  like  you  and  me,  he  faces  the  great  Reality  of 
things  with  many  gaps  and  faults,  many  evil  things,  in  his  life's 
record.  What  then?  Why  again,  he  gets  his  just  judgment. 
The  books  are  posted  and  balanced,  all  the  old  scores  paid  off, 
and  the  whole  matter  of  life  becomes  a  finality.  That  is  all 
that  the  empire  of  law,  that  is  all  that  the  man  who  in  his  life 
has  only  law,  can  see.  His  case  is  settled,  and  the  punctuation 
mark  is  appended.  The  next  generation  comes  on  and  goes 
through  the  same  circle,  to  the  same  award  of  commendation 
or  penalty.  Again  we  must  ask,  What  then?  The  rest,  so 
far  as  law  can  see,  is  fate.  The  law  has  not  imparted  life  but 
only  ordered  it;  has  ordered  it  well,  has  opened  ample  room 
for  duty  and  righteousness  and  wholeness.  But  when  the  law 
has  done  with  educating  the  man,  and  when  untimely  death 
comes,  it  has  at  best  only  got  him  where  he  is  in  shape  for 
unincumbered  duty  and  righteousness  and  holiness  to  begin, 
while  the  most  of  men,  unlike  Job,  must  die  with  their  record 
of  conformity  to  law  still  far  short  of  its  best.  And  the  light 
beyond,  the  next  stage  of  evolution  in  life,  is  still  as  much  in 
the  dark  as  ever.  If  there  had  been  a  law  given  which  could 


54  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

have  given  life,  as  St.  Paul  says,  if  life  were  by  the  law  at 
all,  verily  righteousness  should  have  been  by  the  law.  The 
law  is  not  to  blame;  but  when  the  mystery  of  introduction  to 
another  state  of  existence  comes  the  law  stratum  of  our  being 
simply  has  nothing  to  connote  more  life,  it  connotes  only  its 
own  end  and  reckoning.  We  can  see  now,  therefore,  why, 
when  the  Old  Testament  men  looked  at  death  all  they  could 
imagine  after  it  was  some  kind  of  payment,  reward  or  punish- 
ment, or  it  may  be  safety  and  rest;  but  that  was  not  new  and 
higher  life,  that  was  not  truly  immortality  at  all.  And  this 
because  neither  the  immortality  nor  the  real  principle  and  fibre 
of  life  had  emerged  into  light.  It  belongs  to  a  higher  stratum 
of  manhood,  where  fate  has  passed  on  into  resurrection. 

II.      THE    ADVENT    OF    THE    SPIRIT 

But  what  is  the  spirit  doing  all  this  time?  We  have  seen 
it  in  the  beginning  of  things,  brooding  like  a  mother-bird  on 
the  face  of  the  waters,  as  if  it  would  warm  the  waste  of  chaos 
into  life  and  organism.  And  the  very  first  thing  that  took 
place  thereafter,  according  to  the  sublime  old  record,  was  the 
beginning  of  that  motion,  or  pulsation,  which  we  have  taken 
as  our  biometer,  or  measure  of  life.  "And  God  said,  Let  there 
be  light:  and  there  was  light."  Before  the  sun  and  stars  were 
created,  as  this  strange  account  goes,  light  came  into  being; 
and  whether  or  not,  as  the  scientists  are  conjecturing,  it  may 
have  been  due  to  some  radio-activity  in  the  inchoate  matter, 
its  origin  here  is  described  as  spiritual,  with  a  mind  and  a 
decree  and  a  will  working  in  it. 

In  our  too  narrow-minded  study  of  the  Bible  we  have  al- 
most lost  sight  of  this  initial  power  of  creation  and  its  stored- 
up  potencies.  Certainly,  it  would  seem,  that  spiritual  beginning 
of  things  ought  to  have  continued  in  operation,  working  still 
at  the  core  and  centre  of  creation,  and  always  radiating  enough 
light  to  make  its  presence  and  nature  evident.  It  has  been 
tacitly  supposed,  however,  that  the  spirit  of  God,  having  come 
upon  the  scene  and  set  things  running,  then  proceeded  to  take 


THE   TWILIGHT  STRATUM  55 

a  long  vacation,  not  to  be  heard  of  again  definitely  until  the 
Day  of  Pentecost,  A.D.  33,  was  fully  come;  after  which  date 
He  was  a  resident  of  our  earth,  having  infused  Himself,  like 
flame,  into  the  hearts  of  men.  The  long  intervening  history, 
then,  is  imagined  as  devoid  of  any  divine  spirit;  men  getting 
along  supposedly  the  best  they  could  by  their  own  natural 
light  and  impulse,  and  of  course  always  stumbling  and  stiff- 
necked,  making  mistakes  or  setting  up  rebellions,  and  incur- 
ring punishments.  To  be  sure,  Bezaleel,  the  son  of  Uri,  who 
built  the  tabernacle,  was  said  to  have  been  endowed  by  the 
spirit  of  God  for  the  purpose;  and  sometimes  the  spirit  came 
mysteriously  upon  exceptional  men;  upon  Samson,  making 
him  preternaturally  strong,  and  upon  prophets,  filling  them 
with  a  kind  of  divine  frenzy  and  eloquence.  But  these  in- 
stances were  not  supposed  really  to  count  for  much,  and  the 
disposition  was  to  explain  them  away.  The  Pentecostal  spirit, 
in  fact,  was  so  transcendent,  and  so  immediately  reducible  to 
religious  insight  and  energy,  that  all  the  earlier  history  of  the 
spirit  was  cast  into  the  shade,  as  if  it  were  a  sporadic  matter 
and  virtually  non-existent.  It  is  as  if  the  spirit  had  acted 
consciously  in  the  first  impulse,  and  then  become  reflex  or 
automatic,  working  in  the  world  as  does  breathing  or  digestion 
in  our  bodies,  but  having  to  give  thought  and  concentrated 
will  to  the  starting,  just  as  we  have  to  do  in  learning  to  swim 
or  play  the  piano.  It  is  remarkable  that  the  late  Professor 
Cope,  one  of  our  most  eminent  biologists,  gives  just  this  ex- 
planation of  the  beginning  of  life  on  our  globe:  conscious  ef- 
fort at  first,  enough  to  set  the  vital  machinery  of  organism 
going;  this  he  calls  archaestheticism;  then,  the  life-pulsation 
being  trained  by  repetition  into  habit,  the  machinery  going  on 
automatically  by  itself;  all  of  which  he  calls  catagenesis. 

But  if  Professor  Cope,  looking  on  as  a  spectator  from  out- 
side, can  see  so  far  into  the  creative  act  as  that,  we  have  him  at 
a  great  advantage;  for  we  have  reached  the  stage  of  life  where 
evolution  has  become  conscious  of  itself,  and  where  we  can 
cooperate  in  bringing  it  about;  we  are  inside  the  game,  and 
have  a  light  in  our  hearts  which  enables  us  to  trace  in  some 


56  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

degree  the  divine  initiative  and  pattern.  To  us,  as  to  him, 
things  look  as  if  they  lived  and  grew  of  themselves;  but  from 
our  high  station  within,  where  we  can  put  forth  will,  and  use 
nature's  laws  to  conscious  purpose,  and  perpetuate  life  in  an 
image  at  once  human  and  divine,  we  ought  to  arrive  at  a 
worthier,  less  purely  mechanical  explanation  than  his.  Our 
scientific  apparatus  is  finer;  it  can  go  beyond  terms  of  vibra- 
tion and  natural  selection  to  terms  of  inner  light  and  volition. 
And  our  text-book,  the  Bible,  thinking  in  these  terms,  traces 
life  inward  to  the  informing  spirit  of  God.  True,  it  may  take 
a  poet,  specially  gifted  and  consecrated,  to  have  a  keen  sense 
of  that  spirit's  working  in  nature,  and  to  put  that  sense  into 
utterance.  Enough,  however,  for  our  comfort,  that  the  vision 
exists  in  humanity;  a  vision  which,  because  we  can  respond 
to  the  poet,  we  may  deem  to  exist,  though  it  may  be  dimly,  in 
all  of  us.  Wordsworth,  whose  life  was  consecrated  to  this  very 
thing,  found  what  his  penetrative  spirit  sought, 

a  sense  sublime 

Of  something  far  more  deeply  interfused, 
Whose  dwelling  is  the  light  of  setting  suns, 
And  the  round  ocean  and  the  living  air, 
And  the  blue  sky,  and  in  the  mind  of  man; 
A  motion  and  a  spirit,  that  impels 
All  thinking  things,  all  objects  of  all  thought, 
And  rolls  through  all  things. 

But  the  vision  is  not  the  monopoly  of  poets,  nor  confined  to 
that  sublimated  region  of  seas  and  skies  and  sunsets.  It 
exists  in  things  nearer  home;  its  clearest  and  most  motive- 
giving  realization  is  in  the  common  man.  Elihu,  you  re- 
member, that  self-confident  young  man  who  was  going  to  set 
Job  and  his  friends  right,  puts  it  into  words.  "There  is  a 
spirit  in  man,"  he  says,  "and  the  inspiration  of  the  Almighty 
giveth  them  understanding."  We  have  the  light  in  ourselves, 
shared  with  the  light  and  will  of  the  world;  clear  enough  for 
every  one  to  interrogate  and  utilize  in  active  life. 

Here  then  is  the  situation  of  things:  the  spirit  of  God,  which 
in  the  beginning  brooded  over  chaos,  and  the  spirit  of  man 


THE   TWILIGHT  STRATUM  57 

answering  to  it,  as  face  answereth  face  in  a  glass.  But  it  is 
time  now  to  begin  on  a  definition;  to  begin  on  it,  I  say,  for  it 
will  take  all  the  rest  of  our  discussions  to  compass  the  matter 
in  full.  What  is  spirit?  what  is  a  spirit?  Well,  I  do  not 
profess  to  be  enough  in  the  counsels  of  heaven  to  define  the 
spirit  of  God;  but  we  must,  and  I  think  we  can  get  a  working- 
idea  of  the  spirit  that  is  in  ourselves;  that  part  of  power  of 
our  manhood  of  which  George  Bernard  Shaw,  else  so  sure  of 
things,  says  cautiously,  "if  I  may  so  name  the  unknown."  We 
had  better  begin  simply,  even  though  at  the  risk  of  landing 
this  side  of  an  adequate  conception.  We  all  have  an  idea 
what  is  meant  by  the  spirit  of  a  crowd,  or  of  a  poem,  or  of 
an  age;  we  distinguish  between  the  spirit  and  the  letter  of  a 
law ;  we  have  sometimes  to  take  the*  spirit  of  a  poor  speaker 
in  lieu  of  his  clumsy  words,  like  taking  the  will  for  the  deed. 
In  any  such  case  we  have  a  sense  of  a  certain  animus  or  direc- 
tion of  personality  concentrated  on  some  specific  object  or 
character,  and  working  as  one  energy.  And  now  let  us  think 
of  the  man  we  were  describing,  a  being  introduced  here  into 
a  complex  world,  which  he  gradually  discovers  to  be  a  world 
of  law,  with  which  he  must  intelligently  coordinate  his  own 
nature,  doing  this  in  a  way  for  himself  alone,  for  no  two  men 
are  alike.  Well,  my  idea  of  his  spirit  is,  that  it  is  the  reaction 
of  his  individuality  on  his  world.  Let  us  not  complicate 
matters  here  by  speculating  on  a  disembodied  spirit  floating 
off  by  itself  after  death,  or,  if  such  a  thing  is  possible,  arrested 
and  corraled  by  a  medium;  enough  for  us  at  first  if  we  can 
understand  a  spirit  still  in  the  body  and  in  this  life.  If  we  can 
know  how  it  will  react  on  this  world,  we  are  in  the  best  shape 
to  learn  how  it  will  react  on  any  world,  seen  or  unseen;  that, 
perhaps,  is  what  our  bodies  are  given  us  for,  to  be  the  organs 
of  this  reaction  and  life-energy. 

We  sometimes  get  our  thoughts  tangled  up  by  making  a 
sort  of  dissection  of  our  nature:  as  if  we  were  made  up  of 
three  separable  parts,  body,  soul,  and  spirit;  and  the  idea  of 
this  threefold  combination  leads  to  endless  puzzling  of  mind 
over  the  question  what  part  each  plays  in  the  personality,  and 


58  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

what  may  be  saved  from  the  wreck  when  the  being  is  disin- 
tegrated by  the  failure  of  the  body.  I  think  that  speculations 
on  such  a  basis  are  bound  to  be  futile  and  barren.  We  cannot 
cipher  out  the  problem  by  cutting  the  man  into  pieces;  he 
must  be  and  remain  a  unity,  all  one  man  and  one  character, 
moving  all  together  if  he  move  at  all.  We  do  not  save  him 
by  working  with  or  supposing  any  process  of  disintegration, 
not  even  the  disintegration  of  physical  death.  As  to  this  three- 
fold division,  which  is  natural  enough,  we  may  most  simply 
conceive  of  it  somehow  thus:  Man  has  a  body,  by  means  of 
-which  he  makes  connection  with  this  world,  its  sights  and 
sounds,  its  meats  and  drinks,  its  pleasures  and  pains;  man  has 
a  spirit,  by  which  he  reacts  on  a  world  unseen,  its  ideas  and 
ideals,  its  life  and  light  and  laws;  but  man  is  a  living  soul, 
subsisting  here  between  two  worlds,  and  electing  to  give  su- 
preme allegiance  to  the  one  or  the  other.  Man  is  a  living  soul; 
that  is  what  he  became  when  God  breathed  into  his  nostrils 
the  breath  of  life.  But  that  is  what  also  the  animals  are 
called:  ftp  ttfSJ,  a  living  soul,  a  living  creature.  In  this  re- 
spect he  does  not  differ  from  them;  he  too  is  an  animal,  with 
the  breath  of  the  universal  life-force  in  his  body.  But  he 
has  also  this  unique  endowment,  the  spirit,  by  which  he  moves 
in  a  region  above  the  law  of  the  species,  and  becomes  an  in- 
dividual, with  a  character  all  his  own.  I  am  not  saying  the 
animals  have  no  spirit,  no  reflex  of  that  mighty  life-force; 
"who  knoweth  .  .  .  the  spirit  of  the  beast,  whether  it  goeth 
downward  to  the  earth?"  says  Koheleth.  With  this,  however, 
the  Scripture  is  not  dealing;  and  it  is  in  the  nature  of  the  case 
beyond  our  ken,  which  has  enough  to  do  to  understand  the 
spirit  of  our  kind.  But  on  the  principle  "By  their  fruits  ye 
shall  know  them"  we  may  certainly  say  his  spirit  differs  from 
theirs  not  in  degree  but  in  kind:  he  is  of  them,  with  a  spirit 
that  rises  enormously,  infinitely  beyond  them ;  nay  his  spirit  is 
not  that  of  the  animal  at  all;  if  he  suffers  it  to  become  so,  by 
vice  or  dissipation,  it  is  his  ruin;  he  does  not  even  make  a 
decent  beast.  , 

Here,  then,  he  is  placed,  in  this  world  of  law,  with  a  light 


THE   TWILIGHT  STRATUM  59 

in  him  by  which  he  can  become  acquainted  with  it,  and  with 
its  personal  Source  and  Will,  and  by  which  he  can  react  on 
these  as  he  will.  There  is  a  long  and  rugged  road  for  him  to 
traverse,  before  a  personality  so  richly  endowed  becomes  ma- 
ture. I  am  not  sure  that  in  this  world  at  all  it  can  become 
much  more  than  an  embryonic  life,  —  on  the  true  standard,  I 
mean;  I  am  tempted  to  think  it  cannot  when  I  see  what  halt- 
ing, bungling  work  men  and  nations  make  of  living.  But  here 
he  is,  getting  more  life  and  broader  horizons  step  by  step,  and 
getting  more  light  to  guide  him,  as  his  eyes  become  better 
educated.  "For  with  thee,"  said  a  Psalmist,  "is  the  fountain 
of  life:  in  thy  light  shall  we  see  light."  A  curious  thing,  this 
gradual  education  in  the  perception  of  light.  I  read  an  article 
the  other  day  in  a  scientific  journal  which  furnished  so  striking 
an  analogue  to  our  subject  that  I  first  thought  anew  how  pro- 
foundly true  were  Goethe's  familiar  words, 

Alles  Vergangliche 
1st  nur  ein  Gleichnis, 

"everything  transitory  is  only  a  parable,"  and  then  I  half  hesi- 
tated to  bring  it  in  here  lest  it  might  seem  fantastic  and 
allegorical.  It  was  about  the  color-sense,  as  it  is  found  to  be 
developed  in  primitive  peoples.  An  observer  in  one  of  the 
Philippine  islands  discovered  that  the  native  Visayan  dialect 
had  definite  names  only  for  the  colors  at  the  red  end  of  the 
spectrum,  where  the  vibrations  are  slowest;  that  with  the  color 
green  the  words  became  vague  and  wavering,  seeming  to  sug- 
gest only  the  idea  of  unripe  things,  like  grass  or  uncured  grain; 
and  that  all  above  this,  toward  the  blue  end  of  the  spectrum, 
where  the  vibrations  were  most  rapid,  the  dialect  must  have 
recourse  to  the  later  Spanish.  Then  on  interrogating  school- 
children and  others  he  found  that  all  could  distinguish  red 
well  and  green  fairly  well,  though  with  some  uncertainty  be- 
tween that  and  brown;  but  that  blue,  a  bright  blue  garment 
for  instance,  puzzled  them  all,  some  calling  it  green,  others 
black.  On  further  inquiry,  by  him  and  others,  it  was  found 
to  be  a  pretty  universal  fact  that  primitive  folk  discern  colors 


60  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

in  this  invariable  order:  reds  first,  and  so  on  upward,  always 
in  the  order  of  the  spectrum;  but  that  comparatively  high 
civilization  is  needed  before  they  be  sure  of  blue  at  all.  All 
this  lies  simply  in  the  eye's  accommodating  itself  to  different 
rates  of  vibration.  Is  the  spiritual  order  something  like  this, 
as  men  go  from  animalism  upward?  They  can  see  red  first, 
the  color  of  blood  and  raw  flesh  and  war;  then  they  can  see 
green,  for  it  is  the  color  of  their  green  earth,  and  all  growing 
and  unripe  things ;  but  blue,  the  color  of  the  sky,  they  see  last 
of  all,  and  only  by  advanced  education;  to  them  the  sky  is 
either  black,  like  an  abyss  or  a  midnight,  or  else  it  is  green, 
like  their  unripe  earth,  unready  for  harvest.  What  a  simple 
and  suggestive  gamut  of  light  is  here,  and  how  it  makes  us 
think  of  that  welter  of  slow  development,  during  which  the 
spirit,  reacting  on  its  universe,  is  approaching  the  maturity  of 
its  powers  when,  its  blood-red  wars  and  violences  past,  it  can 
look  wisely  toward  heaven  and  know  that  it  is  neither  the 
blackness  of  death  nor  the  green,  immature  continuation  of 
this  earth  life!  Well,  it  is  a  parable,  like  everything  transi- 
tory; but  the  dream  is  true.  The  spirit  is  receiving  its  orderly 
education  in  life  and  light;  and  the  two  keep  pace  with  each 
other,  each  the  measure  of  the  other. 


HI.      EARLY    SPIRITUAL    REACTIONS 

But  we  have  kept  our  empire  of  law  waiting  all  this  time, 
stationary,  while  we  went  back  to  bring  up  to  date  that  being 
who  by  his  endowment  of  spirit  could  understand  the  law  and 
by  obedience  or  accommodation  or  even  transgression  react 
upon  it.  There  it  has  remained  as  it  will  remain,  a  universal 
thing;  all  the  creation,  high  and  low,  must  bow  to  it  late  or 
soon;  and  one  jot  or  tittle  shall  not  pass  from  it  until  all  be 
fulfilled.  Now  you  see  what  this  spiritual  reaction  is:  it  is 
a  kind  of  initiative,  wherein  man  by  his  innate  wisdom  or 
folly  takes  things  into  his  own  hands,  and  so  by  experience  of 
effects  learns  his  being's  law,  and  is  not  merely  told  it;  learns, 
and  if  he  obeys,  obeys  freely,  rather  than  like  a  machine  which 


THE   TWILIGHT  STRATUM  61 

is  wound  up  and  must  go.  We  have  made  transition  to  the 
higher  ground  which  befits  the  life  of  free  spirit.  The  whole 
scale  of  things  too,  for  good  and  evil,  is  vastly  enlarged:  the 
glory  more  transcendent,  the  woe  more  deep  and  ruinous;  we 
could  deal  with  no  mere  animal  life  on  such  ground.  It  is  the 
spirit  that  marks  the  difference. 

Sooner  or  later,  being  personal,  we  estimate  things  accord- 
ing to  our  own  nature,  and  recognize  the  personal  source  of 
this  empire  of  law:  as  the  Hebrews  figured  it  in  their  tor  ah, 
it  is  like  the  orders  of  a  general  to  his  soldiers,  or  the  instruc- 
tion of  a  teacher  to  his  class.  Now  what  shall  be  the  first 
personal  response,  the  first  spiritual  reaction,  of  a  being  who 
to  begin  with  is  like  a  callow  child,  with  no  wise  experience 
of  life,  and  no  contact  as  yet  with  the  solemn  consequences  of 
things?  For  so,  down  in  that  twilight  stratum,  we  must  needs 
figure  man  as  beginning. 

The  scripture  answer  to  this  question,  which  is  embodied 
in  the  quaint  old  story  of  Adam  and  Eve  and  the  forbidden 
fruit,  shows  the  primitive  man  that  is  in  us  two  things:  first, 
that  a  command  given  from  such  a  source,  as  we  say,  "means 
business,"  it  cannot  safely  be  trifled  with;  and  secondly,  the 
strange  principle  afterward  phrased  by  St.  Paul,  that  by  the 
law  is  the  knowledge  of  sin.  That  silly  couple,  as  we  deem 
them,  acted  just  as  we  probably  should  have  done;  just  like 
those  hapless  children  of  whom  every  week  the  newspaper 
reports,  who  "didn't  know  it  was  loaded,"  or  like  those  idle 
fellows  who  out  of  sheer  wanton  curiosity  toy  with  a  dangerous 
machine.  A  great  many  children  of  a  larger  growth  find  out 
to-day,  I  see  it  not  infrequently  in  students  and  their  reaction 
toward  new  college  enactments,  that,  as  the  slangs ters  say, 
it  won't  do  to  meddle  with  the  buzz-saw.  The  spiritual  re- 
action must  go  deeper  than  that;  we  must  learn  to  take  our 
empire  of  law  seriously  enough  for  our  own  good,  and  not  be 
so  idly  facile  as  to  be  equally  ready,  as  the  chance  comes,  to 
listen  to  a  God  or  a  serpent. 

I  know  how  much  has  been  made  of  that  Adam  and  Eve 


62  THE   LIFE  INDEED 

story;   how  Milton,  voicing  an  almost  morbid  Puritan  con- 
science, described  its  portentous  effects: 

Earth  trembled  from  her  entrails,  as  again 

In  pangs,  and  Nature  gave  a  second  groan; 

Sky  loured,  and,  muttering  thunder,  some  sad  drops 

Wept  at  completing  of  the  mortal  Sin 

Original. 

And  indeed  the  story  goes  deep;  I  have  no  disposition  to  be- 
little it,  far  less  laugh  it  away;  I  do  not  profess  to  give  only 
one  small  aspect  of  it.  But  we  see  human  nature  there,  our 
own  human  nature.  We  see  too,  even  there,  an  authentic  up- 
rise of  the  human  spirit;  and  we  see  how  light,  our  spiritual 
biometer,  kept  pace  with  it.  Their  eyes  were  opened,  and  for 
the  first  time  man  was  as  gods,  seeing  good  and  evil.  The 
effects  were  bad  as  well  as  good;  but  I  confess  that  if  this  was 
the  fall  of  man  it  looks  to  me  uncommonly  like  a  fall  upward. 
Our  first  parents  did  not  take  life  seriously  enough,  to  begin 
with;  though  afterward  Adam,  having  learned  his  costly  lesson, 
went  to  work  like  a  good  boy,  under  his  yoke  of  divine  law, 
his  spirit  bowing  itself  docilely  to  the  order  of  things.  His 
eldest  son,  however,  was  not  so  at  all;  he  was  what  we  call 
a  bad  lot.  Perhaps  there  was  an  inherited  crook  in  his  nature ; 
at  any  rate,  while  on  the  one  side  he  was  energetic,  active,  un- 
meditative,  thoroughly  masculine,  on  the  other  he  was  turbu- 
lent, self-centred,  blindly  set  on  making  things  bend  to  his 
own  untamed  will.  We  may  be  sure  he  never  would  have  been 
tempted  to  self-indulgence  by  a  woman.  It  made  him  sick 
to  see  Abel  there,  so  sweetly  pious  and  so  in  divine  favor; 
though  he  too  went  stolidly  through  the  motions  of  worship 
and  got  no  inner  satisfaction  from  it.  Do  you  reflect  that,  for 
good  or  ill,  here  is  one  half  of  humanity,  the  active,  over- 
coming, business  half?  After  his  dreadful  deed  of  murder, 
the  supreme  sin,  he  went  forth,  you  remember,  to  found  cities, 
and  subdue  the  earth,  and  beget  children  who  were  the  origi- 
nators of  the  arts  of  life,  agriculture,  and  music,  and  the  fine 
and  useful  arts  of  craftsmanship.  From  his  family,  according 
to  the  Bible  record,  came  the  beginnings  of  civilization.  Evi- 


THE   TWILIGHT  STRATUM  63 

dently  here  is  a  strain  of  human  nature  not  to  be  ignored  but 
dealt  with  and  developed.  Perhaps  he  took  this  world,  with 
its  worldly  tasks  and  absorptions,  too  seriously;  I  am  pretty 
sure  that  his  half  of  mankind  does.  And  he  must  be  dealt 
with  on  his  own  ground,  the  ground  of  his  own  turbulent 
masterful  spirit.  It  requires  a  new  combination  with  the  law 
of  things.  This  is  how  the  Bible  story  actually  takes  him. 
For  though  he  had  no  heart  for  the  supreme  law  of  manhood, 
to  be  his  brother's  keeper  and  lover,  he  did  not  fall  into  his 
murderous  deed  unadvisedly  or  without  adequate  warning. 
"Why  art  thou  wroth?  and  why  is  thy  countenance  fallen?" 
was  the  question  that  somehow  had  already  found  way  into 
his  lowering  mind;  "if  thou  doest  well,  is  there  not  an  uplift 
to  go  with  it,  —  not  a  morose,  ill-at-ease,  falling  spirit?'7  But 
you  want  to  be  doing  something,  instead  of  worshipping,  do 
you?  It  is  in  you  to  fight,  to  make  things  yield  to  you,  to 
overcome,  is  it?  Well,  here  is  your  foe.  Sin,  crouching  like 
a  wild  beast  at  your  heart's  door,  crouching  in  craven  fear, 
ready  to  be  subdued.  Now  fight  it;  it  will  yield  to  you;  and 
you  can  work  out  your  spiritual  reaction,  and  reach  the  true 
expression  of  your  manhood  by  the  negative  way,  by  the  way 
of  your  own  energetic  spirit.  Don't  kill  your  brother;  don't 
hate  him;  you  need  him  for  your  work  in  the  world;  kill  your 
sin. 

We  cannot  help  sympathizing,  to  some  extent,  with  the  Cain 
type  of  man.  I  think  the  Bible  does.  It  puts  the  active,  ro- 
bust, practical  work  of  the  world  largely  in  their  hands.  On 
the  other  hand,  with  all  its  unworldly  beauty,  there  is  a  note 
of  the  futile  and  premature  in  the  opposite,  the  saintly  and 
pious  type.  Abel,  his  sweet  life  so  soon  and  tragically 
quenched,  was  as  little  his  brother's  keeper  as  was  Cain. 
Enoch,  who  "walked  with  God,"  lived  out  half  his  days,  the 
world  seemingly  too  bleak  a  climate  for  him,  "and  he  was  not, 
for  God  took  him."  Beautiful  this;  but  all  he  did  was  to  beget 
Methusaleh,  whose  sole  distinction  among  men  was  to  have 
existed  longer  than  any  other  man  that  ever  lived.  There 
seems  to  be  little  if  any  robust  reaction  of  spirit  here;  and  as 


64  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

for  Enoch,  well,  he  was  like  Sir  Gareth,  the  ^nly  knight  who 
won  to  the  full  sight  of  the  holy  grail: 

And  one  hath  had  the  vision  face  to  face, 
And  now  his  chair  desires  him  here  in  vain, 
»    However  they  may  crown  him  otherwhere. 

There  is  something  lacking  in  this  strain  of  life  too. 

This  Enoch  story  brings  us  dimly  to  an  old  concept  of  life 
and  death,  which,  because  its  conditions  were  so  speedily  over- 
turned, we  can  now  neither  prove  nor  disprove.  It  seems  to 
point  to  what  might  have  been  the  outcome  of  the  Eden  ex- 
istence, if  man  had  never  elected  to  take  the  fruit,  that  is, 
exercise  his  own  initiative  out  of  desire  for  knowledge.  He 
was  in  a  garden;  tended  like  the  plants,  caged  in  strict  regu- 
lations and  unquestioning  obedience,  like  the  animals.  Un- 
like the  animals  he  had  the  power  of  initiative;  its  reward,  to 
know  good  and  evil,  like  God;  its  risk,  to  know  hardship  and 
death.  He  might  have  chosen  the  passive  obedient  state,  and 
might  have  passed  out  of  the  earthly  stage  of  existence  not 
by  death  but  as  Enoch  did.  The  animals  have  apparently  little 
real  fear  and  pain  of  death;  he  as  the  more  highly  evolved 
creature  might  normally  have  had  still  less,  or  have  passed 
on  like  the  chrysalis  into  the  butterfly.  But  it  would  have  been 
passing  onward  from  a  kind  of  vegetative  life,  a  life  passive 
instead  of  active,  a  life  not  cooperating  intelligently  with  God, 
but  as  the  unenterprising  automaton  of  God.  To  exert  his 
spirit,  on  the  other  hand,  exposed  him  to  deadly  risk,  nay  to 
deadly  certainty,  —  and  he  chose,  virtually,  for  the  sake  of 
inheriting  higher  things,  to  take  the  risk.  He  would  rather 
die  knowing  and  originating  action  than  as  a  passively  moved 
thing.  Was  it  worth  the  risk?  It  takes  centuries  to  answer 
the  question;  but  the  freely  chosen  death  of  the  Son  of  man, 
for  love's  sake,  is  the  supreme  answer. 

An  immense  interest  there  is  in  those  naive  old  stories  of 
Genesis,  which  embody  the  conception  of  how  man's  nature 
fares  before  he  begins  to  write  his  laws  on  stone:  the  giants 
in  the  earth;  the  rising  tide  of  wickedness;  the  clean  sweep  of 
the  flood  and  new  beginning;  the  Babel  tower  aspiring  to 


THE   TWILIGHT  STRATUM  65 

heaven;  then  later  Abraham  the  friend  of  God,  dreaming  of 
being  a  blessing  to  all  the  earth;  and  peaceful  Isaac  among 
his  flocks;  and  Esau  the  surly,  stupid,  hungry  hunter,  whose 
high  birthright  carried  with  it  no  answering  sense  of  noblesse 
oblige;  and  Jacob,  with  his  rare  combination  of  business 
shrewdness  on  the  one  side  and  intense  devotion  to  the  ideal 
on  the  other.  But  I  must  not  linger  with  these  old-world 
tales,  full  of  meat  though  they  are.  Is  it  not  clear  by  this 
time,  that  even  in  our  twilight  stratum  of  life  that  brooding 
kindly  spirit  of  the  beginning  of  things  was  neither  taking 
a  vacation  nor  working  automatically?  We  see  his  work  right 
where  we  ought  to  look  for  it,  right  where  evolution  becomes 
conscious  and  cooperative;  in  the  answering  spirit  of  man, 
which  as  it  is  warmed  and  lighted  by  the  spirit  of  God  comes 
forth  from  its  germinant  sleep,  and  rounds  into  individuality, 
and  grows.  Not  always  like  Enoch  or  Abel,  and  sometimes 
sinking  back  almost  to  the  abyss  where,  as  Browning  says, 

God  unmakes  but  to  remake  the  soul 
He  else  made  first  in  vain; 

seldom  failing,  even  in  ruins  to  show,  as  Hamlet  admiringly 
puts  it,  "his  naked  spirit,  how  majestical,"  or  to  prove,  by 
negative  vices  as  well  as  positive  virtues, 

That  life  is  not  as  idle  ore, 

But  iron  dug  from  central  gloom, 

And  heated  hot  with  burning  fears, 

And  dipt  in  baths  of  hissing  tears, 
And    batter'd    with    the    shocks    of    doom 

To  shape  and  use. 

There  are  strange  and  endlessly  advancing  combinations  here, 
of  deep  action  and  reaction,  of  eternal  and  transitory,  of 
worldly  and  other-worldly,  of  divine  and  human;  and  in  them 
all,  though  universal  law  is  establishing  its  domain,  yet  life 
too,  the  life  of  the  free  and  joyous  spirit,  is  surely  coming 
step  by  step  into  the  light. 


66  THE  LIFE  INDEED 


IV.      THE    BURDEN    AND    THE    CRAVING 

I  can  only  indicate  now  in  briefest  summary,  what  the  tone 
and  temper  of  life  comes  to  be  when  man  reaches  the  point 
where  he  writes  his  laws  on  stone,  and  is,  for  good  or  ill,  be- 
yond that  blessed  immunity  wherein,  as  St.  Paul  says,  "sin 
is  not  imputed  where  there  is  no  law."  I  have  named  this  the 
burden  and  the  craving.  Perhaps  we  can  put  it  best  in  the 
songs  that  men  sing;  the  musical  outflow  of  a  full  and  hopeful 
heart.  There  is  no  lack  of  such  songs;  we  derive  our  own 
music  still  from  the  Hebrew  Book  of  Psalms.  In  church  the 
other  day  I  heard  the  choir's  closing  anthem,  "I  will  sing  of 
mercy  and  judgment'7;  and  these  words  sum  it  all  up,  in  one 
melodious  utterance.  The  spirit  of  man,  respond  how  it  would 
to  the  law  of  manhood  being,  felt  the  need  when  the  best  was 
done  of  a  forgiving  mercy  and  gracious  allowance;  yet  also 
felt  that  the  best  it  could  do  was  worthy  enough  to  welcome 
the  light  of  heaven  upon  it  and  abide  the  verdict,  the  verdict 
pronounced  by  the  eternal  court  of  God.  Under  these  two 
ideas,  mercy  and  judgment,  we  may  sum  up  the  spirit  of  man, 
in  this  twilight  period  when  the  outcome  of  life  was  still  dim, 
as  living  and  working. 

Let  us  imagine  what  must  have  been  the  mood  engendered, 
the  universal  consciousness  of  things,  when  the  growing  sense 
of  law  had  become  the  sense  of  an  empire  of  law,  a  kind  of  at- 
mosphere enveloping  the  whole  life  and  getting  into  the  nerves 
and  blood,  a  something  that  must  be  endured  and  observed,  a 
something  as  natural  as  breathing.  That  is  what  the  sense 
of  the  Hebrew  world  progressively  became,  before  the  coming 
of  thrist.  It  has  been  called  the  night  of  legalism,  during 
which  men  became  more  and  more  iron-bound  and  imprisoned, 
and  less  clearly  cognizant  of  any  outlet  but  final  justice  and 
retribution.  It  must  have  been,  on  the  whole,  an  austere  and 
tyrannous  era.  Not  all  could  put  it  into  words,  but  all  could 
feel  more  or  less  heavily  the  immense  burden  of  it;  and  while 
the  more  stolid  spirits  were  mercifully  spared  the  keen  sense 


THE   TWILIGHT  STRATUM  67 

of  it,  with  the  finer  spirits,  like  Job,  the  feeling  of  the  arbi- 
trariness and  essential  iniquity  of  the  world-order  rose  some- 
times to  an  agony  of  indignation  and  remonstrance.  When  we 
think  how  all-encompassing  this  atmosphere  of  law  became, 
we  almost  wonder  that  men  could  sing  at  all.  I  sum  up  this 
felt  dispensation  in  a  word,  as  the  spirit  of  man  on  the  under 
side  of  things.  It  is  the  same  dispensation  that  Professor 
Haeckel  feels  and  blindly  maintains  in  nature  and  material 
life,  thinking  of  law  as  an  automatic  and  self-acting  thing.  It 
amounts  to  the  same,  when,  as  with  the  Hebrews,  the  law  is 
sensed  as  an  empire  wherein  the  spirit  of  man  is  subject  to 
a  Will  imposed  upon  him  from  without,  and  only  partially 
though  growingly  understood. 

Such  a  felt  governance  of  things  is  certainly  heroic  treat- 
ment, as  befits  a  being  whose  naked  spirit  is  so  majestical. 
Its  effect  in  the  large,  according  to  his  response  to  it,  is  one 
of  two  things:  it  makes  him  either  a  slave  or  an  athlete. 

The  sense  of  bondage,  the  feeling  of  being  a  slave,  rises  and 
grows,  just  as  the  realization  of  law,  of  its  largeness  and  per- 
fectness  and  majesty,  becomes  more  keen  and  ample.  A  simple 
personal  command,  to  begin  with,  which  its  first  recipients 
hardly  took  seriously,  it  grew  and  spread  and  covered  the  field 
of  life,  it  penetrated  inward  and  upward,  until  it  became  a 
thing  unsearchable,  unfathomable,  impossible.  If  men  had 
seen  at  the  beginning  what  it  would  lead  to,  would  they  ever 
have  committed  themselves  to  it  at  all?  Yet  it  was  unes- 
capable;  the  very  spirit  within  them  impelled  them  to  it  as 
to  a  fate,  giving  such  inner  warning  and  counsel  alike  as  was 
given  to  the  aspiring  knights  of  Arthur: 

For    the    King 

Will  bind  thee  by  such  vows  as  is  a  shame 
A  man  should  not  be  bound  by,  yet  the  which 
No  man  can  keep. 

It  is  by  such  law  as  this,  consented  to  all  the  while  as  holy 
and  just  and  good,  that  men  get  the  knowledge  of  sin.  They 
develop,  in  fact,  the  strange  consciousness  that  a  man  cannot 
but  sin;  that  he  is  a  depraved  being,  totally  depraved,  his 


68  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

heart  deceitful  above  all  things  and  desperately  wicked.  You 
remember  that  awful  theological  thesis  which  was  the  corner- 
stone of  the  late  Professor  Shedd's  system:  "Sin  a  nature,  and 
that  nature  guilt."  Well,  the  same  savage  theology,  fiercer 
even  than  Professor  Shedd's,  was  maintained  by  the  friends  of 
Job;  who,  you  remember,  took  that  afflicted  patriarch,  perfect 
and  upright  as  he  was,  and  told  him  that  he  was  being  pun- 
ished not  merely  because  he  had  sinned  to  deserve  it,  but  be- 
cause, being  a  mortal,  a  man,  he  was  so  impure  in  the  stand- 
ard of  heaven,  so  innately  crooked  and  depraved,  that  his 
utmost  punishment  was  no  more  than  he  deserved,  nay,  was 
really  too  good  for  him.  A  strange  situation  this,  for  man's 
thoughts  of  his  world  to  have  reached.  Yet  they  could  not 
easily  get  round  the  logic  of  it,  if  they  explored  their  law  of 
being  to  its  deeper  spiritual  involvements.  It  all  rose,  I  think, 
from  the  growing  sense  that  their  law  was  so  high  and  holy, 
and  that  at  every  step  it  had  to  encounter  a  law  of  sin  in  their 
members  warring  against  it.  "It  is  high,  I  cannot  attain  unto 
it,"  was  the  aspiring  yet  despairing  song  that  they  sang  in  the 
night.  And  along  with  this  sense  arose  also  the  feeling  that  if 
ever  they  were  to  come  out  well  at  last  they  must  have  mercy 
accorded  them;  must  transfer  their  utmost  efforts  from  the 
sphere  of  strict  justice  to  the  sphere  of  forgiveness,  allowance, 
mercy.  What  they  came  short  must  be  made  up  by  grace 
and  compassion  on  the  part  of  their  Judge.  You  remember 
that  they  dared,  in  the  face  of  this  iron  law,  to  cherish  the 
ideal  that  came  along  with  the  law  from  Moses  himself.  "The 
Lord,  the  Lord  God,  merciful  and  gracious,  long-suffering,  and 
abundant  in  goodness  and  truth,  keeping  mercy  for  thousands, 
forgiving  iniquity  and  transgression  and  sin,  and  that  will  by 
no  means  acquit."  Note  that  last  clause:  the  Lord  will  never 
acquit  a  man,  and  say  that  he  did  not  transgress  when  he  did; 
the  integrity  of  the  law,  the  truth  of  things,  must  be  eternally 
acknowledged;  but  He  will  forgive,  will  take  the  guilt  as  guilt, 
and  cover  it  up  with  mercy.  A  sublime  discovery  this,  is  it 
not?  the  spirit  of  man  rising  so  out  of  the  darkness  and  slavery 
of  law,  and  attaining  to  such  light  on  the  divine  life.  The 


THE   TWILIGHT  STRATUM  69 

light  seemed  to  come  from  without,  to  be  revealed;  and  we 
cannot  say  it  was  not  and  that  men  only  thought  so;  but  we 
can  say  there  was  light  enough  in  the  human  spirit  to  meet  it, 
and  put  it  into  words,  and  trust  in  it  as  a  support  in  their 
empire  of  bondage  and  sacred  slavery. 

But  this  felt  governance  of  law  was  also  developing  the 
athlete:  the  man  who  felt  he  could  obey  it,  and  get  it  thor- 
oughly into  his  blood  and  life,  and  live  up  to  it.  The  man 
perfect  and  upright,  whose  savage  friends  so  misjudged  him, 
was  strong,  you  remember,  to  maintain  his  integrity,  to  assert 
it  in  the  face  of  God,  nay,  even  to  call  God  to  account  in  the 
interest  of  the  Godlike  and  compel  Him  to  revise  His  law; 
you  remember  too  how  Job's  last  word,  before  death  ushered 
him,  or  as  he  thought  would  usher  him,  before  the  dread  judg- 
ment seat,  was  that  of  lifting  up  the  clean  record  of  his  life 
on  his  shoulder,  which  he  would  bear  before  the  throne  like 
a  prince.  What  a  picture  of  the  life  athlete  this  is!  And  there 
must  have  been  many  holy  souls  who  took  up  their  burden 
of  law,  not  as  men  overworked  and  heavy-laden,  but  like  the 
strong  man  rejoicing  to  run  a  race.  They  were  eager  to  com- 
mit themselves  to  such  heroic  treatment  of  law  for  the  good, 
and  the  strength,  and  the  growth,  and  the  fibre  of  discipline, 
that  they  saw  in  it.  Read  the  one  hundred  and  nineteenth 
psalm,  that  unique  panegyric  of  law,  that  joyful  acceptance 
of  all  its  phases,  if  you  want  to  understand  the  mind  of  the 
spiritual  athlete;  it  is  a  truer  picture  of  the  grand  old  regime, 
I  am  sure,  than  the  savage  logic  of  the  friends  of  Job.  Think 
too  how  lovingly  and  thoroughly  the  Hebrews  extended  the 
application  of  their  law;  even  beyond  their  scripture  text 
into  the  minute  enactments  of  rabbinism  and  Pharisaism; 
hungry,  as  it  were,  to  make  its  sphere  absolute,  extending  to 
every  smallest  duty  of  life;  until  when  our  Lord  came  He 
found  it  top-heavy  and  unwieldy  with  the  traditions  of  the 
elders.  This  may  have  engendered  hypocrisy  and  all  sorts  of 
external  observance;  but  think  what  a  vigor  of  loyalty  and 
obedience  must  have  underlain;  think  too  that  such  a  regime 
could  produce  a  Saul  of  Tarsus,  who  even  in  the  new  freedom 


70  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

of  his  Christian  consciousness  could  still  be  proud  of  having 
walked  in  all  the  ordinances  of  the  law,  blameless.  Yes:  the 
sense  of  law  had  also  its  tonic  and  joyful  side;  it  was  not  all 
bondage  and  slavery. 

You  will  notice  just  here,  too,  that  judgment  in  the  Old 
Testament  is  not  a  thing  to  cower  before  and  dread,  as  if 
man,  conscious  of  having  his  fling  now,  or  perhaps  his  stum- 
blings and  mistakes,  were  some  day  to  catch  it,  as  we  say,  and 
take  his  punishment.  Judgment  was  a  thing  that  men  longed 
for,  called  for;  as  an  athlete,  who  knows  that  he  has  played  a 
good  game,  wants  the  truth  to  appear,  and  calls  out  to  the 
umpire,  "Judgment!"  "Judge  me,  O  Lord,  for  I  have  walked 
in  mine  integrity,"  is  the  Psalmist's  prayer.  It  could  be  of- 
fered only  by  one  who  felt  that  on  the  whole  he  had  done 
well,  had  observed  the  law  of  his  being;  and  was  not  only 
willing  to  abide  by  the  award,  whatever  it  was,  but  eager  to 
know  more  accurately  what  is  the  high  standard  of  things. 

For  always,  with  the  athlete  and  the  slave  alike,  there  is 
the  sense  that  man  is  yet  incomplete,  that  what  he  does  and 
sees  is  still  only  partial,  immature,  far  behind  the  ideal ;  hence 
his  craving  for  judgment,  for  the  pronouncing  of  things  as 
they  are;  and  that  some  such  day  of  light  will  come,  when 
the  worn  and  sinful  slave  of  law  shall  have  attained  to  what 
men  call  salvation,  which  is  only  another  name  for  health  and 
undiseased  manhood;  well,  there  is  not  wanting  some  glim- 
mering of  the  idea  that  life  will  one  day  be  more  than  work 
and  wages,  more  than  mere  judgment  on  what  has  been; 
though  in  this  twilight  stratum  the  light  is  still  dim,  only  a 
faint  streak  above  the  eastern  hills.  It  is  like  Tennyson's 
outlook  from  his  gruesome  Vision  of  Sin: 

At  last  I  heard  a  voice  upon  the  slope 
Cry  to  the  summit,  "Is  there  any  hope?" 
To  which  an  answer  peal'd  from  that  high  land, 
But  in  a  tongue  no  man  could  understand; 
And  on  the  glimmering  limit  far  withdrawn 
God  made  Himself  an  awful  rose  of  dawn. 


Ill 

NEARING  THE  FULNESS   OF   THE   TIME 

WHAT   GLEAMS   OF   NOBLER   PROMISE   APPEAR   AS   THE 
SOUL   APPROACHES    ITS    MAJORITY 

I.    THE  END  OF  THE  COSMIC  TETHER 
II.    ON  THE  FRONTIER  OF  ADULT  LIFE 
III.    THE  SOUL  OF  PROPHECY 


Ill 

NEARING  THE   FULNESS   OF   THE   TIME 

A  DISCOVERY  on  which  the  late  John  Fiske  prided 
himself  not  a  little,  giving  him,  as  it  so  far  forth 
did,  original  and  not  merely  spokesman  rights  in 
the  goodly  fellowship  of  the  evolutionists,  Spencer  and  Huxley 
and  Darwin,  was  the  discovery  of  the  relative  length  of  the 
period  of  infancy  in  man  and  the  lower  animals.  It  was  Mr. 
Fiske  who  set  forth  the  important  fact  that  animals  have  a 
shorter  and  less  helplessly  dependent  infancy  in  proportion  as 
they  have  a  less  complex  life  to  evolve.  Man,  as  compared 
with  the  whole  domain  of  animal  life  below  him,  has  so  much 
more  to  learn,  so  much  wider  relations  to  adjust  himself  to, 
and  especially  in  exploring  that  new  region  of  intellect  and 
reason  which  it  is  his  special  business  to  evolve,  not  only  be- 
gins life  more  helplessly  but  remains  callow  and  immature 
longer  than  any  other  living  creature.  He  comes  eventually 
to  more,  but  he  has  more,  infinitely  more,  to  come  to.  We 
can  then,  to  some  extent,  measure  the  worth  and  dignity  of 
his  life,  as  compared  with  that  of  his  fellow-animals,  by  the 
amount  of  time  he  must  take  to  get  his  vital  powers  in  working 
order  and  arrive  at  the  fulness  of  them.  It  is  his  relative 
greatness  that  makes  the  difference. 

The  analogy  still  holds  good,  or  rather  it  is  not  an  analogy 
at  all  but  continues  a  literal  fact,  when  we  enter  that  higher 
stadium  of  life  wherein  the  spirit  is  waking  from  its  preex- 
istent  torpor  and  learning  in  a  sort  of  crude,  halting,  embry- 
onic way  to  react  wisely  on  its  world  of  manhood  law.  If  it 
takes  twenty-one  years  for  man  in  this  existence  to  traverse 
childhood  and  youth  and  come  to  his  majority,  how  much 
longer  must  it  take  proportionally  for  the  human  spirit  to 

73 


74  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

shape  itself  to  the  majestic  model  of  the  world  to  come,  so 
that  when  finally  man  enters  upon  his  full  heritage  he  may 
enter  as  an  adult,  and  as  a  prince  to  the  manner  born?  Four 
thousand  years,  according  to  Archbishop  Usher's  scripture 
chronology,  was  the  period  of  man's  spiritual  infancy,  or  per- 
haps we  ought  even  to  say  embryonic  life;  it  took  all  those 
millenniums  of  bondage  and  twilight  before  St.  Paul  could  say, 
"When  the  fulness  of  the  time  was  come."  Evidently,  then, 
that  must  have  been  a  great  thing  for  which  such  long  growth 
and  maturing  was  needed;  we  do  not  half  realize  its  greatness 
yet. 

I  have  chosen  for  purposes  of  our  exposition  to  call  this  old 
legal  dispensation  not  a  period  or  era  but  a  stratum;  and  in 
the  deepest  sense  this  is  what  it  is.  Instead  of  saying  there 
was  a  time,  we  may  just  as  truly  say  there  is  a  stratum  of 
manhood  life,  of  your  life  and  mine,  from  which  there  is  no 
outlook  but  dimness  and  bondage.  But  the  Scripture  puts  this 
before  us  as  history,  to  which  we  can  apply  our  historic 
methods  of  study,  and  see  its  elements  actually  at  work.  There 
was  also  a  time,  which  from  obscure  beginnings  swept  up  grad- 
ually through  increasing  foregleams  and  clearness  to  the  ful- 
ness of  the  time.  Just  as  we  figure  heaven  as  both  a  state 
and  a  place,  so  this  immortal  manhood  of  ours  is  set  before  us 
both  as  an  inner  spirit  and  as  a  development,  an  evolution,  in 
the  care  of  the  hours  and  the  years;  and  what  takes  place  in 
one  takes  place  in  the  other.  By  the  careful  study  of  the 
time,  then,  we  may  get  a  growing  idea  of  that  essentially  time- 
less life  within  us.  The  years  of  the  world  are  man's  re- 
source, his  opportunity,  his  mercy. 

Wait:  my  faith  is  large  in  Time, 
And  that  which  shapes  it  to  some  perfect  end. 

But  what  was  the  trend  of  this  long  time,  this  four  thousand 
year  period,  during  which  the  great  blind  unwieldy  world  of 
manhood  was  creeping  upward  to  the  goal  of  which  finally  it 
could  be  said,  Here  is  the  culmination,  the  fulness?  This  is 
the  question  that  we  are  undertaking,  as  guided  by  Scripture, 


HEARING   THE  FULNESS  OF  THE   TIME    75 

to  answer.  We  have  seen  a  little  of  its  beginning;  at  which, 
like  a  hapless  child,  man  did  not  take  the  law  of  his  being  seri- 
ously enough,  and  found  as  his  first  discovery  that  it  was 
woven  with  the  nature  of  things  and  had  power  to  hurt  him. 
We  have  seen  him  then  taking  the  worldly  tasks  and  achieve- 
ments of  it  so  seriously,  and  so  with  an  eye  to  self-expression, 
that  he  ignored  the  gentle  claims  of  his  brother,  —  could  not 
consent  to  live  and  let  live  too.  We  see  him  then  becoming 
immersed  in  the  affairs  of  this  life,  with  its  call  for  order  and 
adjustment  and  human  institutions;  immersed  in  them  as  if 
they  were  all  there  is,  and  as  if  like  the  man  with  the  muck- 
rake he  could  look  no  way  but  downward.  But  all  this  while 
there  was  his  endowment  of  the  spirit,  and  even  the  combina- 
tions it  made  with  worldly  things  were  not  animal  alone,  and 
not  merely  intellectual,  but  blindly  spiritual,  and  therefore 
elemental.  It  penetrated  inward,  away  from  the  mere  demands 
of  the  body  and  its  world,  inward  and  dimly  upward,  until  it 
stood  on  the  frontier  of  the  world  to  come,  which  also  was  the 
frontier  of  its  own  adult  life.  Its  approaching  heaven  was  also 
its  approaching  manhood,  wherein  all  its  powers  could  be  sure 
of  themselves,  and  wise,  and  worthy  of  manhood  responsibility. 
The  countless  reactions  of  the  human  spirit,  through  the  long 
twilight,  worked  together  toward  this  result,  until  at  length 
the  fulness  of  the  time  was  near,  and  the  coming  dawn  was 
brightening  the  eastern  horizon. 

It  would  be  very  charming,  doubtless,  to  go  on  describing 
all  this  in  poetic  imagery;  and  it  has  already  been  abundantly 
reasoned  out  in  systems  of  theology.  What  we  want  now, 
however,  while  not  abjuring  all  that  we  can  get  from  these,  are 
the  large  and  literal  facts  of  the  case.  What  was  the  reality 
of  things,  as  a  growing  evolutionary  fact?  I  have  tried  to 
make  a  beginning  on  our  definition  of  the  spirit,  the  active 
power  of  it  all;  but  as  you  are  aware,  I  could  get  only  a  little 
way,  and  I  warned  you  as  much.  It  still  has  an  ocean  of  the 
unknown  behind  it,  and  man  has  to  find  himself  out,  by  slow 
degrees,  as  he  goes  along.  Meanwhile  a  curious  old  text  in 
Proverbs  haunted  me,  and  I  looked  it  up  in  the  concordance; 


76  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

here  it  is,  it  may  serve  to  give  our  idea  another  clarifying  ele- 
ment. "The  spirit  of  man,"  says  this  proverb,  "is  the  candle 
of  the  Lord,  searching  all  the  inward  parts  of  the  body."  Does 
it  not  seem  strange  that  the  Bible,  so  jealous  as  it  is  for  the 
claims  of  the  divine,  did  not  turn  this  right  round,  saying  that 
the  spirit  of  the  Lord  is  the  candle  that  searches  the  inward 
parts.  This  latter  is  doubtless  true,  as  we  should  find  if  we 
went  back  far  enough;  but  both  things,  it  would  seem,  are 
true,  each  in  its  place;  for  the  human  candle  was  lighted  at 
the  sun.  The  proverb  calls  up  in  turn  a  remark  of  St.  Paul's. 
"For  what  man,"  says  he,  "knoweth  the  things  of  a  man,  save 
the  spirit  of  man  which  is  in  him?"  This  is  what  we  are  after: 
the  things  of  a  man,  the  growing  complex  of  things  mounting 
up  to  the  summit  of  manhood.  Is  it  not  reassuring  then  to 
know,  and  on  scripture  assertion,  that  this  elemental  spirit  of 
manhood,  apart  from  an  arbitrary  or  mystic  revelation,  is  en- 
dowed with  a  kind  of  radio-active  light  which  is  candle  enough 
to  light  our  way,  if  we  will  give  it  fair  and  adequate  heed? 

Of  the  conscious  interaction  of  this  spirit  of  man  with  the 
spirit  of  God,  which  latter  we  are  thinking  of  in  scientific 
terms  as  the  eternal  evolution  spirit,  and  which  the  Hebrews 
suggestively  name  the  spirit  of  Jehovah,  Him  who  is,  the  time 
will  come  to  speak;  we  cannot  take  this  up  now.  It  is  more 
to  our  present  purpose  to  note,  that  when  St.  Paul  announces 
the  fulness  of  the  time,  the  beginning  of  what  he  elsewhere 
calls  the  dispensation  of  the  fulness  of  times,  he  connects  it 
with  the  coming  of  One  to  whom  was  given  the  spirit  without 
measure.  We  simply  note  this  fact  also  here;  not  concerned 
at  present  with  the  question  how  much  more  He  was  than 
man,  how  much  too  high  for  our  manhood  to  compass. 
Enough  for  us  that  in  the  same  passage  St.  Paul  takes  special 
pains  to  make  Him  out  true  man,  "made  of  a  woman,  made 
under  the  law,"  that  is,  an  authentic  product  of  the  evolution 
we  are  tracing.  He  is  squarely  and  honestly  in  the  line;  that 
is  to  say,  transcendent  as  we  all  own  Him  to  be,  His  appear- 
ance on  earth  is  not  catastrophic  but  evolutionary,  not  an 
unmotived  irruption  from  without,  but  the  culmination  of 


NEARING   THE  FULNESS  OF   THE   TIME    77 

forces  working  within,  such  powers  as  are  germinant  in  you 
and  me  and  may  be  traced  by  the  little  candle  which  our  ele- 
mental being  already  carries.  This  fulness  of  the  time  that 
we  are  nearing,  —  some  call  it  the  coming  of  the  Son  of  man, 
some  call  it  the  coming  of  the  Son  of  God;  both  theological 
ideas,  hard  to  fathom.  But  of  one  thing  we  are  assured,  and 
it  is  to  be  tested  on  the  ground  not  merely  of  theological  con- 
ception but  of  scientific,  evolutionary  fact:  that  this  fulness 
of  the  time  was  the  mark  of  rounded,  matured,  adult  manhood. 
If  this  has  also  elements  of  the  supernatural,  let  us  at  least 
deal  honestly  by  them;  the  candle  that  is  in  us  will,  I  hope, 
enable  us  to  see  things  as  they  are. 

I.      THE    END    OF    THE    COSMIC    TETHER 

Standing  now  on  the  upper  edge  of  this  twilight  stratum  of 
life,  where  we  can  look  back  over  the  way  we  have  traversed, 
and  forward  toward  what  the  manhood  soul  has  come  to  desire 
and  anticipate,  what  is  the  scenery  of  things,  what  is  the  spirit 
of  man  beginning  to  discern  and  demand? 

Well,  to  begin  with,  I  am  reckless  enough  here  to  quote 
again  that  naughty  man,  George  Bernard  Shaw,  who  I  think 
with  all  his  posturing  and  wrong-headedness  is  really  pounding 
at  a  big  idea.  "We  have  seen,"  he  says,  "that  as  Man  grows 
through  the  ages,  he  finds  himself  bolder  by  the  growth  of  his 
spirit  (if  I  may  so  name  the  unknown)  and  dares  more  and 
more  to  love  and  trust  instead  of  to  fear  and  fight.  But  his 
courage  has  other  effects :  he  also  raises  himself  from  mere  con- 
sciousness to  knowledge  by  daring  more  and  more  to  face  facts 
and  tell  himself  the  truth.  For  in  his  infancy  of  helplessness 
and  terror  he  could  not  face  the  inexorable,  and  facts  being  of 
all  things  the  most  inexorable,  he  masked  all  the  threatening 
ones  as  fast  as  he  discovered  them ;  so  that  now  every  mask  re- 
quires a  hero  to  tear  it  off.  The  king  of  terrors,  Death,  was 
the  Arch-Inexorable:  Man  could  not  bear  the  dread  of  that 
thought.  He  must  persuade  himself  that  Death  could  be  pro- 
pitiated, circumvented,  abolished.  How  he  fixed  the  mask  of 


78  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

immortality  on  the  face  of  Death  for  this  purpose  we  all  know. 
And  he  did  the  like  with  all  disagreeables  as  long  as  they  re- 
mained inevitable.  Otherwise  he  must  have  gone  mad  with 
terror  of  the  grim  shapes  around  him,  headed  by  the  skeleton 
with  the  scythe  and  hour-glass.  The  masks  were  his  ideals, 
as  he  called  them;  and  what,  he  would  ask,  would  life  be 
without  ideals?  Thus  he  became  an  idealist,  and  remained 
so  until  he  dared  to  begin  pulling  the  masks  off  and  looking 
the  spectres  in  the  face  —  dared,  that  is,  to  be  more  and  more 
a  realist.  But  all  men  are  not  equally  brave;  and  the  greatest 
terror  prevailed  whenever  some  realist  bolder  than  the  rest 
laid  hand  on  a  mask  which  they  did  not  yet  dare  to  do  with- 
out." 

Of  all  the  scripture  men  who  dared  to  pull  the  mask  of  con- 
ventional ideal  off  from  the  face  of  facts,  the  boldest,  the 
most  uncompromising,  and  accordingly  the  hardest  to  accept, 
is  the  Hebrew  sage  who  calls  himself  Koheleth,  or  Ecclesiastes. 
His  book  stands  just  at  the  nodal  point  of  the  Old  Dispensa- 
tion, where  the  so-called  night  of  legalism  is  darkest  and  most 
prevailing,  and  where,  influenced  by  the  self-pleasing  Greek 
philosophy,  men  are  beginning  to  dream  of  escape  into  the 
sweet  lubber-land  of  immortality.  Being,  if  we  except  the 
author  of  Job,  the  only  real  philosopher  who  has  invaded  the 
Bible  scheme  of  life,  we  look  to  him  with  keen  interest  to  see 
what  kind  of  a  fist  a  dyed-in-the-wool  Hebrew  will  make  at 
philosophizing.  But  we  find  him  not  so  much  a  philosopher 
as  a  kind  of  pioneer  scientist;  he  does  not  speculate  at  all,  but 
just  searches  the  world  for  cold  hard  facts,  not  blinking  the 
bitter  and  disagreeable  things,  or  trying  to  solve  the  insoluble. 
His  one  hungry  desire  is  to  see  things  as  they  are;  his  su- 
preme resolve  not  to  cheat  himself  with  glamours  or  specious 
excuses.  The  voluble  vaticinations  of  immortality  around  him, 
and  the  flood  of  idle  words  "about  it  and  about"  irritate  him; 
for  in  the  prevailing  crookedness  of  things  he  is  well  aware 
that  there  is  not  underlying  fibre  enough  of  character  to  make 
a  real  backbone  for  such  tremendous  presage.  So  his  self- 
appointed  business  is  to  tear  the  masks  off  from  the  facts  of 


NEARING   THE  FULNESS  OF  THE   TIME    79 

life,  to  be  a  realist;  and  if  all  is  vanity,  "weary,  stale,  flat,  and 
unprofitable,"  to  own  it  without  fancy  or  flinching. 

Now  if  this  is  true,  or  in  so  far  as  it  is  true,  the  world  can- 
not afford  not  to  know  it  and  govern  itself  accordingly.  And 
indeed  there  are  moods  of  men,  and  strains  of  contemplation, 
wherein  Koheleth's  words  come  with  all  the  force  of  iron  con- 
viction. Of  course  they  do  not  set  forth  the  only  facts  in  the 
world,  but  only  the  facts  that  nucleate  round  some  one  point 
of  view.  We  must  ask  of  them  therefore,  On  what  principle 
are  they  true,  in  accord  with  what  presuppositions  are  they 
true?  And  looking  into  Koheleth's  book  for  his  presuppo- 
sitions, we  find  a  great  truth,  namely,  that  he  has  reached  to 
the  deadlock  of  life,  where  he  perceives  that  the  old  scheme  of 
things  is  worn  out,  and  the  new  not  yet  ready  to  appear.  In 
other  words,  from  his  point  of  view  manhood  has  reached  the 
end  of  the  cosmic  tether;  has  gone  as  far  in  the  resources  of 
life  as  this  world  and  this  world's  ways  will  let  him;  has  used 
up  his  available  vitality,  so  to  say,  in  adjusting  his  soul  to 
this  prevailing  empire  of  law,  and  has  none  left  over  to  col- 
onize a  new  world  and  rise  from  height  to  height  in  a  new 
life.  This  is  the  deep  ground  of  his  strange  indictment  of 
things;  all  his  book  flows  out  of  this,  and  all  its  abysmal  sad- 
ness. 

He  begins  with  the  world  of  nature  and  of  man  as  man; 
for  in  his  ponderings  his  imagination  has  become  enlarged 
enough  to  overflow  the  Jewish  nation  and  its  parish  affairs, 
the  Mosaic  dispensation  and  its  austere  legalism,  that  magni- 
fied law  of  the  species  in  which  the  Hebrews  have  imprisoned 
their  sympathies.  His  consciousness  has  become  cosmic;  for 
him  the  empire  of  law  has  become  universal.  And  wherever 
law  works  it  exhibits  the  same  traits.  It  is  not  a  forward- 
moving  thing  but  a  thing  restraining  and  regulative;  a  rou- 
tine, a  treadmill,  a  huge  wheel  of  being  and  fate,  which,  when 
it  has  come  round  full  circle,  simply  starts  again,  with  nothing 
new  under  the  sun  to  show  for  its  labored  revolution.  The 
next  generation  is  like  this,  just  as  tomorrow's  sun  runs  the 
same  course  as  to-day's,  just  as  the  wind  whirleth  and  con- 


8o  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

tinually,  and  the  sea,  never  full,  returns  to  its  sources  in  the 
mountains.  And  for  all  the  world  is  so  full  of  labor,  yet  it 
all  passes  soon  and  is  forgotten.  Then  there  is  death,  at  once 
a  spectre  and  a  hard  concrete  fact,  coming  untimely  to  end  it 
all,  for  man  and  beast,  wise  and  fool,  alike.  So  this  treadmill 
is  virtually  a  prison,  with  no  apparent  release  to  larger  life, 
but  only  the  opening  of  the  cell  to  the  gallows  and  the  grave. 
In  a  word,  here  in  this  law-enslaved  world  Koheleth  misses 
the  element  of  progress  and  uprise;  its  ongoings  do  not  seem, 
as  we  say,  to  be  motived;  the  race  of  men  labors  but  does 
not  clearly  accomplish  a  work.  There  is  a  lack  of  wages,  of 
profit,  of  surplusage,  to  crown  the  life  that  man  expends  so 
lavishly.  He  can  get  his  fill,  in  money  and  luxury  and  fame; 
but  what  is  it  all  when  he  has  got  it?  Reckoning  up  the  net 
proceeds  of  living,  on  this  plane  and  scale,  —  what  is  it  all 
worth,  and  where  the  profit? 

Yet  there  it  is,  the  inexorable  fact:  law,  law,  everywhere; 
cause  and  effect,  sowing  and  reaping,  work  and  wages,  the 
wheel  never  still.  You  can  imagine  what  this  enlarged  con- 
sciousness of  things  must  be,  when  it  gets  into  the  blood  and 
nerves  of  a  soul  big  enough  to  realize  it.  It  does  not  drive 
him  mad  or  pessimistic  as  it  does  so  many,  the  Nietzsches  and 
the  Schopenhauers  and  the  Ibsens;  for  his  heart  is  big,  and  as 
he  expresses  it,  he  keeps  his  wisdom  on  top;  he  is  concerned 
all  the  while,  if  not  to  escape  it,  yet  to  bear  it  manfully  and 
make  the  best  of  it.  This  is  his  real  attitude  to  things.  He 
will  look  facts  in  the  face,  flinching  not  before  the  last  and 
sternest  fact  of  all;  he  will  tell  himself  the  truth;  and  then  he 
will  adjust  himself  to  it.  Something  good  must  come,  we  may 
be  sure,  from  such  an  attitude. 

Yet  when  he  turns  from  great  nature  and  the  wheel  of  being, 
which,  though  a  grinding  routine,  is  at  least  uniform,  equable, 
calculable,  and  looks  into  the  world  of  human  affairs,  a  new 
and  puzzling  element  meets  him.  Something  there  is,  as  we 
say,  queering  the  game;  turning  the  machinery  askew,  so  that 
it  sometimes  works  in  reverse  order.  "Lo,  this  only  have  I 
found,  that  God  hath  made  man  upright;  but  they  have  sought 


NEARING   THE  FULNESS  OF   THE   TIME    81 

out  many  inventions."  Ah,  we  begin  to  see  what  this  disturb- 
ing element  is:  it  is  the  spirit  of  man,  acting  on  its  own  ac- 
count, and  capable  of  acting  at  cross  purposes.  If  it  cannot 
escape  the  law  of  being,  yet,  being  shrewd  and  cunning,  it  can 
interpret,  and  accommodate,  and  in  many  ways  evade.  Hence 
the  oppressions  that  are  wrought  under  the  sun,  and  the  deadly 
competitions  and  rivalries;  hence  the  cynical  disregard  of  the 
poor  and  helpless,  and  the  crowding  of  the  under  man  to  the 
wall;  hence  the  cry  of  the  laborer  and  the  sneer  of  the  capi- 
talist; hence  the  hypocrisy  and  falseness  that  creep  even  into 
the  house  of  God.  We  all  know  how  it  is  and  has  been.  I 
was  reading  the  other  day  in  Conan  Doyle's  story  of  Sir  Nigel 
how  things  were  even  in  sacred  precincts  as  late  as  1348  years 
after  Christ.  In  a  conversation  between  the  Abbot  of  Wa- 
verley  and  his  sacristan,  the  inquiry  is  made  why  the  young 
Nigel  has  committed  certain  depredations. 

"Because  [says  the  sacristan]  he  hates  the  House  of  Waverley,  holy  father; 
because  he  swears  that  we  hold  his  father's  land." 

"In  which  there  is  surely  some  truth." 

"But,  holy  father,  we  hold  no  more  than  the  law  has  allowed." 

"True,  brother,  and  yet  between  ourselves,  we  may  admit  that  the  heavier 
purse  may  weigh  down  the  scales  of  Justice.  .  .  .  Well,  well,  the  law  is 
the  law,  and  if  you  can  use  it  to  hurt  it  is  still  lawful  to  do  so.  ...  I  will 
teach  him  that  the  servants  of  Holy  Church,  even  though  we  of  the  rule 
of  St.  Bernard  be  the  lowliest  and  humblest  of  her  children,  can  still  defend 
their  own  against  the  f reward  and  the  violent!" 

This  is  a  novelist's  tale,  perhaps  you  say,  and  printed  in  a 
Sunday  paper  at  that;  let  us  not  use  it  to  prove  actual  facts. 
Well,  let  us  turn  to  the  present,  wherein  supposedly  the  keen 
brain  of  society  is  working  to  devise  remedies  and  punishments 
for  the  iniquities  of  men;  to  the  present  and  to  actual  fact. 
In  a  recent  editorial  on  an  unspeakable  horror  which  has  come 
to  light,  I  read: 

There  are  times  when  punishments  imposed  by  man-made  laws  must  ever 
seem  grotesquely  inadequate  to  secure  exact  justice  to  all  who  are  concerned 
in  crime.  Moral  guilt  and  legal  guilt  often  are  not  measured  by  the  same 
standards,  and  punishments  get  hopelessly  astray. 

All  this,  modern  as  it  is,  fits  in  to  Koheleth's  picture 
of  the  puzzling  welter  of  things  on  the  old  law  standard;  it 


82  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

is  not  of  a  day,  but  of  all  time.  "God  hath  made  man  upright; 
but  they  have  sought  out  many  inventions."  The  spirit  of 
man,  reacting  on  its  complex  world,  gets  sadly  tangled  up  with 
the  laws  of  things;  defines  them  frowardly  or  crudely;  so  that 
whether  he  is  seeking  selfish  advantage  or  strict  justice,  he 
makes  a  mess  of  it.  It  looks,  does  it  not,  as  if  the  poet's  words 
had  got  to  come  to  pass: 

Ere  she  gain  her  Heavenly-best,  a  God  must  mingle  with  the  game. 

You  remember  how  this  same  poet's  Koheleth  mood  almost 
got  the  better  of  him  in  his  old  age,  as  this  same  welter  of 
things  took  deeper  possession  of  his  imagination: 

What  is  all  of  it  worth? 

What  the  philosophies,  all  the  sciences,  poesy,  varying  voices  of  prayer? 
All  that  is  noblest,  all  that  is  basest,  all  that  is  filthy  with  all  that  is  fair? 

What  but  a  murmur  of  gnats  in  the  gloom,  or  a  moment's  anger  of  bees  in 
their  hive? 

The  fact  is,  —  and  Job  as  well  as  Koheleth  is  beginning  to  dis- 
cover it,  —  a  world  in  which  there  is  only  law  and  justice, 
arbitrary  Will  and  unchosen  submission,  work  and  wage, 
barter  and  profit;  a  world  in  which,  from  the  deeps  of  nature 
to  the  heights  of  reason,  there  are  only  these  for  the  majestic 
spirit  of  man  to  react  upon,  is  only  half  a  world.  There  is  a 
whole  hemisphere  of  being  yet  to  enter,  a  hemisphere  in  which 
alone,  if  anywhere,  are  the  ultimate  powers  adequate  to  bring 
these  tangled  laws  into  shape  and  order.  No  jot  or  tittle  can 
pass  from  law  till  all  is  fulfilled;  but  —  it  must  be  fulfilled, 
it  must  bear  its  fruit  of  righteousness  and  justice.  And  this 
it  is  not  doing,  with  only  these  elements  available;  the  spirit 
of  man,  that  unconscionable  marplot,  has  utterly  queered  the 
game.  And  so  far  as  that  age  can  see,  the  end  of  the  cosmic 
tether  is  reached;  there  seems  no  room  for  anything  beyond. 
Is  it  any  wonder  that  Koheleth  sternly  puts  away  the  dream 
of  immortality,  seeing  as  he  does  only  these  confused  materials 
to  make  an  immortality  out  of?  He  will  not  tell  himself  a 
lie;  and  his  distinction,  sad  yet  strong,  is,  that  he  will  not  look 


NEARING   THE  FULNESS  OF   THE   TIME    83 

at  futurity  through  a  hole  or  through  idle  speculations;  he  is 
determined  to  work  and  wait. 

All  this,  you  will  say,  looks  like  anything  but  nearing  the 
fulness  of  the  time.  It  looks  rather,  if  such  fulness  is  coming, 
like  the  darkest  hour  before  the  dawn.  This,  indeed,  is  just 
what  it  is;  and  is  not  this  something?  Is  it  not  something  for 
the  spirit  of  man  so  to  have  outgrown  its  environment,  as  to 
feel  that  the  potencies  of  the  old  order  are  exhausted?  When 
we  reach  the  point  where  we  can  define  our  world,  define  it 
and  put  the  full  stop  to  it,  we  already  stand  on  the  upper  fron- 
tier of  it;  it  is  below  us,  albeit  played-out  and  dead;  and  we, 
as  Maeterlinck  phrases  it,  have  secured  the  foothold  where- 
from  to  take  flight  into  life.  This  is  something;  this  is  a  great 
deal.  The  spirit  of  man  has  yet  his  true  history  to  write;  all 
heretofore  has  been  but  a  blind  welter,  as  it  were  the  auto- 
matic and  reflex  motions  of  an  embryo,  and  we  cannot  rightly 
interpret  their  uses  until  we  can  see  them  working  out  the 
rudiments  of  greater  things. 

For  we  are  Ancients  of  the  earth, 
And  in  the  morning  of  the  times. 

And  even  to  this  twilight  stratum,  in  its  darkest  hour,  the 
morning  is  surely  drawing  near. 


II.      ON    THE    FRONTIER    OF    ADULT    LIFE 

Our  thought  of  the  end  of  the  cosmic  tether,  a  tether  which 
the  spirit  of  man  strains  at  and  stretches  but  cannot  break, 
has  revealed  to  us  the  negative  side  of  the  case;  and  by  tearing 
the  mask  off  the  facts  of  life  has  disclosed  strange  discordant 
powers  working  there,  working  crudely,  blindly,  and  sometimes 
in  inverse  order.  It  remains  now  to  look  at  the  positive  and 
upbuilding  side  of  things;  to  see  what  elements  of  solid  worth 
and  insight  the  spirit  of  man  has  attained  to,  now  that  he  has 
traversed  the  dim  childish  tract  of  life,  and  stands  on  the 
frontier  of  adult  manhood.  We  can  by  this  means  get  a  clearer 
notion  of  how  truly  he  is  nearing  the  fulness  of  the  time. 


84  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

Mr.  Shaw,  in  the  passage  I  have  quoted  above,  seems  to 
make  great  virtue  of  tearing  off  masks,  and  looking  the  facts  of 
the  world  in  the  face.  He  is  drawing  up  a  case  of  forewarned, 
forearmed;  is  not  that  all  we  need:  to  see  things  as  they  are, 
the  bitter  and  gruesome  things,  the  inexorable  things;  and  to 
adjust  our  spiritual  reaction  and  attitude  to  them?  Realism 
—  that  is  the  thing ;  to  his  mind  it  is  the  business  of  the  grow- 
ing spirit  to  outgrow  these  fond  or  fearful  idealistic  dreams. 
But  have  you  noticed  that  the  spirit  of  man  cannot  bear  more 
than  a  certain  limited  amount  of  pure  realism?  See  how  it 
works  in  literature,  which  you  know  is  the  spirit  of  man  put- 
ting itself  into  words  and  figures.  Notice,  for  one  thing,  how 
sure  realism  is,  in  its  report  of  life,  to  steer  either  for  the  dis- 
agreeable and  dirty  facts,  as  in  Zola,  or  for  the  commonplace 
and  humdrum  facts,  as  in  Howells  and  his  school.  Then  for 
another  thing  notice  that  realism  lacks  the  tonic  element;  it 
sees  things  as  they  are  on  its  own  plane,  but  it  does  not  see 
with  hope  and  uplift;  the  thing  that  it  detects  behind  the  mask 
is  after  all  its  own  image,  and  the  gospel  it  preaches  is  the 
gospel  of  the  fox  that  cut  off  its  tail  and  wanted  all  other  foxes 
to  experience  the  joy  of  taillessness.  But  for  some  reason 
great  Nature  had  given  the  fox  a  tail,  a  fine  bushy  member, 
as  it  would  seem,  to  make  use  of.  A  feeling  like  this  comes  by 
a  sure  reaction  betimes  in  literature;  men  get  tired  of  unre- 
lieved realism  and  take  refuge  in  the  wildest,  most  impossible 
romance.  All  this  is  not  an  idle  figure,  it  is  human  nature. 
Men  cannot  bear  the  onesidedness  of  seeing  things  as  they  are; 
their  true  desire  is  to  see  things  as  they  ought  to  be.  It  is 
in  us  to  dream;  all  the  sleeping  half  of  our  life,  when  the  will 
is  quiescent  and  recruiting  its  powers,  is  spent  in  the  mysteri- 
ous land  of  dreams.  Then  add  to  this  fact  the  strenuous  He- 
brew view:  "We  are  saved  by  hope:  but  hope  that  is  seen- 
that  is,  realism  —  is  not  hope:  for  what  a  man  seeth,  why  doth 
he  yet  hope  for?  But  if  we  hope  for  that  we  see  not,  then 
do  we  with  patience  wait  for  it."  In  other  words,  it  won't  do, 
it  is  not  in  man  to  outgrow  idealism.  Idealism  has  its  prac- 
tical work  in  life;  our  whole  salvation,  our  buoyant  health  of 


NEARING   THE  FULNESS  OF  THE   TIME    85 

soul,  is  dependent  on  it,  is  bound  up  in  hoping  for  that  we  see 
not.  "Where  there  is  no  vision,"  says  the  proverb,  "the  people 
perish,"  or  as  I  think  the  word  more  accurately  means,  they 
are  let  loose  and  let  down.  And  that  is  the  certain  result  of 
unrelieved  realism. 

An  ideal  has  been  dimly  growing,  and  rounding  feature  by 
feature  into  definiteness,  all  through  this  twilight  period;  like 
the  pattern  wrought  from  the  wrong  side  of  some  rich  tapestry. 
It  is  the  ideal  of  free,  unimpeded,  undictated,  self-directive 
manhood.  Men  are  getting  the  feeling  that  they  have  been 
governed  long  enough  from  some  remote  and  unseen  capital 
outside;  they  want  home  rule;  they  want  the  seat  of  govern- 
ment in  their  own  hearts.  Even  the  poor  work  they  make  in 
administering  the  laws  of  their  being,  nay  even  their  impulse 
to  accommodate  and  pervert  and  evade  these,  but  serves  to 
intensify  this  feeling.  The  ideal  is  knocking  loudly  at  the 
doors;  it  will  take  no  denial.  We  may  focus  this  ideal,  per- 
haps, in  the  words  of  Robert  Louis  Stevenson:  "He  may  be  a 
man,  in  short,  acting  on  his  own  instincts,  keeping  in  his  own 
shape  that  God  made  him  in;  and  not  a  mere  crank  in  the 
social  engine-house,  welded  on  principles  that  he  does  not  un- 
derstand, and  for  purposes  that  he  does  not  care  for."  If  this 
rightly  expresses  the  deep  consciousness  to  which  the  spirit 
of  man  has  grown,  now  that  he  is  nearing  the  fulness  of  the 
time,  we  can  realize  what  a  marvelous  road  of  advance  he  has 
traversed,  since  Moses,  with  his  new-made  law,  took  him  at 
the  edge  of  the  wilderness  and  said,  "Ye  shall  not  do  after  all 
the  things  that  we  do  here  this  day,  every  man  whatsoever  is 
right  in  his  own  eyes."  Yet  this  advance  connotes  no  spirit 
of  rebellion  or  evasion;  that  is  the  ennobling  feature  of  it. 
He  is  getting  ready  now,  at  last,  to  do  whatsoever  is  right  in 
his  own  eyes,  because  by  a  long  and  beneficent  though  stren- 
uous education,  he  has  come  to  identify  this  with  what  is  right 
in  the  eyes  of  God.  It  is  by  no  means  for  nothing,  or  for  a 
small  thing,  that  he  has  had  his  protracted  schooling  in  the 
ideal  of  duty  —  what  is  due,  to  God,  himself,  and  his  world, 
—  and  of  righteousness,  Tightness,  straightness,  the  square 


86  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

deal.  He  is  ready  now  to  take  up  that  supreme  ideal,  holi- 
ness, the  whole  man,  acting  out  his  adult,  self-directive  nature. 
Here  is  where  St.  Paul's  idea  of  the  true  function  of  law 
comes  in,  what  law  is  really  for  in  the  evolving  order  of  things. 
"The  law,"  he  says,  "was  our  schoolmaster,  to  bring  us  to  'the 
point  where'  we  might  be  justified,"  that  is,  secure  and  em- 
body justice,  righteousness,  manhood,  "by  faith."  What  faith 
means,  we  shall  discuss  later.  The  word,  pedagogue,  her  trans- 
lated schoolmaster,  does  not  mean  a  teacher,  nor  a  master  ex- 
cept in  limited  sense;  it  was  the  word  used  to  designate 
a  servant  of  the  house,  usually  a  slave,  whose  duty  it  was  to 
conduct  the  growing  boy  to  and  from  the  public  school,  so 
that  without  molestation  or  truancy  he  might  be  in  the  way 
of  getting  his  real  education  in  life  elsewhere.  You  can  see 
then  what  the  word  connotes.  It  recognizes  the  fact  that  the 
child  is  yet  a  child:  immature,  without  fully-formed  judgment 
or  trained  impulse,  still  looking  up  and  learning,  still  under 
the  law  of  enforced  obedience  to  tutors  and  governors.  The 
law,  St.  Paul  says,  was  our  pedagogue,  our  childhood  guardian. 
And  the  man,  though  with  all  the  potencies  of  manhood  grow- 
ing within  him,  is  still  a  minor,  not  yet  self-directive,  not  yet 
treated  as  an  adult,  not  yet  ready  to  take  the  helm  of  life  into 
his  own  hands.  He  must  be  led,  must  submit  to  leading  up  to 
the  last  moment,  yet  led  in  such  a  way  that  when  the  clock 
strikes  he  may  be  trusted  to  take  the  helm  and  not  wreck  him- 
self. When  the  time  comes  he  must  be  ready;  that  sacred  trust 
of  freedom,  of  fully  developed  personality,  must  find  in  him  a 
worth  and  a  ripeness  so  ingrained  that  his  life  thenceforth 
shall  not  be  a  wild  anarchy,  or  a  weak  failure,  or  a  base  re- 
version to  dissipation  and  animalism.  A  great  thing  it  is,  this 
educative  stage,  wherein  he  must  follow  his  pedagogue  and  be 
under  tutors  and  governors.  It  is  the  stage  in  which,  before 
he  is  held  fully  responsible  for  mistakes  and  errors,  while  he 
yet  has  the  immunities  and  merciful  allowances  accorded  to 
a  minor,  he  can  train  himself  in  the  motions  and  habitudes  of 
manhood,  the  elements  of  freedom.  The  servant  is  to  become 
an  heir  and  a  son;  and  he  who  in  his  dealings  with  his  eirH 


HEARING   THE  FULNESS  OF  THE   TIME    87 

pire  of  law  felt  the  sinews  of  strength  is  to  become  an  athlete 
and  a  victor. 

Now  as  I  have  just  said,  this  schoolmaster  or  pedagogue,  in 
St.  Paul's  view,  was  not  a  teacher,  nor  in  the  essential  sense 
a  master.  He  was  only  a  guardian,  to  lead  to  school,  to  pro- 
tect and  defend.  We  do  not  get  our  education  then,  it  seems, 
from  law:  this  storing  up  of  wisdom  toward  adult  life  comes 
otherwise.  What  then  is  the  source  of  our  education?  Again 
we  must  have  recourse  to  our  constant  term,  which  by  this 
time,  you  will  think,  is  growing  monotonous.  It  is  the  spirit 
of  man,  reacting  on  his  world  of  experience,  and  forming  there- 
from usages  and  ideals.  The  spirit  of  man  we  last  con- 
templated as  a  kind  of  marplot,  invading  the  equable  and 
calculable  reign  of  law  and  queering  the  game  by  all  sorts  of 
inventions  and  perversions.  But  that  reaction  of  the  spirit 
comes  only  when  the  law  is  felt  as  an  alien  element,  only  when 
there  is  lack  of  or  imperfect  sympathy  with  it.  And  that  is 
one  of  the  limitations  of  childhood  and  youth;  even  to  the  date 
of  his  majority,  to  his  twenty-first  birthday,  the  young  man 
has  wisdom  yet  to  learn,  so  truly  so  indeed  that  until  then  the 
laws  of  men  do  not  fully  trust  him.  And  all  this  while  the 
spirit  of  man  has  other  uses  than  to  evade  and  accommodate 
the  terms  of  living;  other  and  higher  wisdom  than  to  tear  off 
masks  and  look  the  sordid  facts  in  the  face.  Youth  is  the  fa- 
vored time  for  ideals,  the  time  for  mounting  and  abounding 
vigor  to  aspire  forward  and  create  new  worlds.  And  after  all 
it  is  only  a  side-line,  only  a  negative  thing,  that  it  should  lay 
out  strength  and  wisdom  at  cross  purposes  with  the  order  of 
things.  More  truly,  more  fundamentally,  the  youth  of  man- 
hood is  laying  out  its  strength,  according  to  its  growing  wis- 
dom, in  manliness.  It  is  coming  to  see  the  law  of  its  being  as 
not  iniquitous  and  bungling  but  as  holy  and  just  and  good.  It 
is  gradually  working  the  law  in,  to  the  tissues  of  its  being,  into 
bone  and  red  blood  and  muscle,  so  that  when  the  hour  of  ma- 
jority comes  this  shall  be  no  longer  the  expression  of  an  alien 
Will  imposed  from  without,  but  what  St.  Paul  calls  the  law  of 
the  spirit  of  life. 


88  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

I  cannot  dwell  on  this  idea  longer  here;  though  it  opens  up 
many  vistas  of  conduct  and  noble  training  and  broadening 
horizons  of  being.  Another  time  will  come  to  speak  of  the 
spiritual  athlete,  training  his  muscles  to  sure  and  harmonious 
action,  and  as  he  approaches  adult  manhood  rejoicing  as  a 
strong  man  to  run  a  race.  Here  I  will  speak  of  only  one 
thing  more.  We  sometimes  see  the  disagreeable  youth,  the 
loafer,  who  has  learned  to  smoke  and  swear,  and  whose  atti- 
tude to  all  things  fine  and  noble  is  bumptious,  sneering, 
cynical.  But  such  a  phenomenon  of  life  impresses  us  as  patho- 
logical; it  is  not  a  health  of  manhood  but  a  disease;  its  course 
is  downward,  and  if  it  survives  from  youth  to  age  becomes 
disgusting  and  melancholy  indeed.  To  lose  reverence  for 
things  above  us,  to  lose  the  capacity  of  wonder  and  worship, 
is  the  great  disaster  of  growing  life.  But  you  will  have  noticed 
one  thing  that  in  the  progress  of  this  twilight  period  man  did 
seem  to  lose;  and  that  was  the  sense  of  God's  nearness.  Enoch 
walked  with  God,  and  he  was  not,  for  God  took  him;  Abraham 
talked  with  God  at  the  door  of  his  tent;  Moses,  the  pioneer  of 
law,  saw  God  as  did  no  man  after  him,  face  to  face.  But 
these  things  were  one  mark  of  infancy,  when  men  had  to  cling 
to  the  arm  and  word  of  God  for  everything  they  did.  When 
they  got  along  far  enough  to  see  and  explore  their  being's  law, 
the  person  of  God  began  to  become  remote;  He  was  progres- 
sively thought  of  as  a  Being  throned  off  somewhere  out  of 
sight,  and  out  of  our  active  life.  And  in  the  place  of  this  talk- 
ing face  to  face  there  came  a  sense  of  distance  which  wrought 
to  develop  a  feeling  of  reverence;  for  God  was  no  longer  on 
our  childish  level  but  high,  infinitely  high  above  us.  You  re- 
member how  Koheleth  rebukes  the  chattering  empty-headed 
fools  of  his  day,  who  brought  their  unseemly  sacrifice  of  words 
to  the  house  of  God:  "God  is  in  heaven  and  thou  upon  earth, 
therefore  let  thy  words  be  few."  Is  this  then  a  reversion,  an 
evolution  of  the  spirit  of  man  backward  and  away  from  the 
spirit  of  God?  Not  so.  The  spirit  is  by  such  process  striking 
in,  becoming  more  deeply  and  wisely  ingrained  in  life  and  man- 
hood. Browning  has  a  striking  idea,  that  God's  way  with  man 


NEARING   THE  FULNESS  OF   THE   TIME    89 

is  to  let  him  go,  put  him  a  little  away  from  Himself,  in  order 
that  man  may  have  the  chance  to  try  his  powers  and  learn 
what  he  is  made  of.  It  is  a  true  idea;  we  see  it  working  here 
at  the  frontier  of  adult  life,  working  in  the  very  fact  that  the 
consciousness  of  God  has  become  pale  and  remote.  For  along 
with  it  the  consciousness  of  life  and  its  claims  is  becoming 
larger,  nobler,  more  knit  with  the  fibres  of  being.  And  though 
his  wisdom  comes  to  discern  that  he  is  at  the  end  of  the  cosmic 
tether,  yet  the  tether  is  not  broken,  nor  can  it  be;  his  very 
sense  of  greatness,  and  of  readiness  to  emerge  from  the  under 
side  of  things  but  ministers  a  greater  reverence;  reverence 
both  for  God  and  for  the  boundless  potencies  of  manhood  law. 
So  even  in  the  sense  that  he  must  obey  the  law  of  life,  the 
Being  from  whom  the  decree  ultimately  came  forth  is  really 
nearer  than  ever,  in  his  mouth  and  in  his  heart. 

So  nigh  is  grandeur  to  our  dust, 

So  near  is  God  to  man, 
When    Duty   whispers   low,    "Thou   must," 

The  youth  replies  "/  can" 

I  can;  think  how  truly  we  are  on  the  frontier  of  adult  life 
when  we  can  look  upward  and  forward  and  say,  "I  can."  The 
hour  of  our  spiritual  majority  is  all  ready  to  strike. 

III.      THE    SOUL    OF    PROPHECY 

"I  will  sing  of  mercy  and  judgment."  I  wonder  if  we 
realize  how  great  the  boon  was  to  the  striving,  stumbling, 
dim-eyed,  wrong-headed  humanity  of  the  old  dispensation,  that 
they  could  raise  such  a  song;  that  in  this  rigid  empire  of  law, 
always  exacting  its  stern  tribute  of  righteousness,  there  was 
let  down,  as  it  were,  over  the  hearts  of  men  the  protecting 
aegis  of  mercy,  compassion,  long-suffering,  generous  allowance. 
Consider  the  case  once  more.  Here  was  the  creative  Power 
of  the  world  manifesting  His  work  and  purpose;  manifesting 
it  first  of  all  in  simple  power;  the  same  revelation  which  the 
naturalists  and  scientists  of  to-day  are  so  desperately  trying 
to  trace,  the  same  unity  of  design  and  interrelation  which  is 


90  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

sweeping  upward  to  include  in  its  purview  everything  that  is, 
the  head  and  heart  of  creation,  as  well  as  its  hands  and  its 
hidden  automatic  energies.  The  idea  of  law  is  this  Creative 
Power's  first  and  fundamental  word;  the  rubric  under  which, 
however  our  thoughts  enlarge,  we  must  realize  the  comprehen- 
sive oneness  of  things.  And  yet,  as  soon  as  we  get  high  enough 
in  the  scale  to  traverse  the  conscious  stratum  of  evolution, 
where  we  can  begin  to  cooperate  in  the  design,  we  become 
aware  how  inevitable  is  a  certain  crookedness  in  things,  which 
keeps  back  the  law,  the  manhood  law  especially,  from  its  free 
and  full  course.  We  learn  this  by  our  own  human  experience, 
the  law  in  our  members  which,  even  when  we  would  do  good, 
makes  evil  to  be  present  with  us;  so  that  like  Paul,  when  the 
sense  of  it  comes  upon  us  unrelieved,  we  cry  out,  "O  wretched 
man  that  I  am!  who  shall  deliver  me  from  the  body  of  this 
death?"  This  cry  is  not  a  fiction  of  Christian  doctrine;  it 
is  the  cry  of  the  human,  as  man  finds  the  meaning  of  his  na- 
ture and  situation  in  the  world.  And  now  consider  how  much 
it  means  that  he  can  sing  of  an  order  of  things  wherein  is  not 
only  a  Power  that  works  but  a  Heart  that  waits;  waits  for 
better  and  truer  things,  and  meanwhile  has  mercy,  and  makes 
allowance.  The  consciousness  of  that  is  what  keeps  the  old 
Hebrew  mind  sane,  enabling  it  to  do  its  work  manfully  and 
cheerfully,  in  spite  of  a  broken  law  of  being. 

You  may  perhaps  have  noticed,  ere  this,  that  whenever  I 
have  come  in  sight  of  what  is  called  the  problem  of  evil  I  have 
merely  glanced  at  it  and  gone  on  my  way.  That  problem,  you 
know,  has  been  the  great  puzzle  of  theology;  to  the  untheolo- 
gized  world  too,  it  has  in  like  manner  stood  in  the  way  as  a 
fated  mystery,  an  insoluble  enigma.  Why  man,  the  highest 
product  of  evolution,  should  be  capable  of  the  lowest  degrada- 
tion, should  have  in  him  the  ability,  nay  the  tendency,  to  wreck 
his  manhood  by  sin,  is  as  hard  a  nut  for  science  to  crack  as 
for  theology.  Must  it  remain,  then,  the  impenetrable  secret 
of  being,  an  eternal  barrier  to  the  uprise  of  the  highest  created 
thing?  I  have  not  avoided  it  because  I  would  evade  it  or 
belittle  it;  I  have  kept  it  for  the  place  in  which  we  could  bring 


N EARING   THE  FULNESS  OF   THE   TIME    91 

the  most  elements  which  make  for  solution  to  bear  upon  it. 
Nor  would  I,  even  now,  set  my  humble  self  up  to  clarify  what 
has  so  long  puzzled  the  doctors;  I  wish  merely  to  mention  the 
contribution  which  I  think  this  stage  of  our  study  makes  to 
it.  Sin,  we  note,  is  a  discount  and  an  evil  which  goes  along 
with  an  empire  of  law;  it  is  an  element  of  the  twilight  stratum 
of  manhood;  in  fact,  it  is  by  the  law,  as  St.  Paul  tells  us,  that 
the  knowledge  of  sin  comes,  and  sin  is  not  imputed  where 
there  is  no  law.  Yet  by  the  side  of  sin,  in  the  foul  midst  of 
sin,  and  emphasized  even  more  than  its  presence,  is  always 
brought  to  light  this  element  of  gracious  allowance  and  forgive- 
ness. "The  Lord,  the  Lord  God,  merciful  and  gracious,  long- 
suffering,  and  abundant  in  goodness  and  truth,  keeping  mercy 
for  thousands,  forgiving  iniquity  and  transgression  and  sin;" 
this  is  the  burden  of  the  old  revelation,  insisted  on  at  such 
length  and  fulness,  before  the  addition  is  made,  "and  that  will 
by  no  means  acquit."  He  visits  iniquity  upon  generations; 
He  keeps  mercy  for  ever.  The  sin  is  regarded  from  the  unseen 
places  as  a  temporary  thing;  because,  somehow,  imbedded  in 
the  nature  of  manhood,  there  is  a  healing  element,  a  beneficent 
waiting  and  growing  power,  which  sometime  will  make  the 
sin  as  if  it  were  not.  We  see  some  suggestion  of  this  in  the 
way  Nature  covers  up  crumbling  ruins  with  her  green  vegeta- 
tion, and  makes  fertile  grain  fields  out  of  the  places  where,  in 
battle,  multitudes  of  men  killed  each  other.  But  this  is  only 
a  partial  suggestion;  for  the  ruins  do  not  cease  to  be  ruins,  nor 
do  the  butchered  dead  come  to  life,  unless  it  be  to  a  lower 
form  of  life.  For  the  true  significance  of  it  we  must  go  to  a 
higher  level  of  being;  to  the  plane  where  the  evolved  creature 
comes  in  sight  of  his  living  Source.  And  there  we  find  this 
truth:  that  in  all  this  matter  of  sin  man  is  persistently  and 
consistently  treated  as  if  he  were  not  yet  fully  evolved,  as  if 
he  were  still  a  child,  with  a  child's  unbridled  impulses  and  un- 
ripe judgment,  as  if  he  were  in  a  cavern,  stumbling  along  in 
dimness  of  light,  as  if  he  were  a  minor,  not  yet  ready  for  his 
heritage  of  free  personality.  It  is  no  great  feeder  to  our  pride, 
but  it  is  a  mercy,  that  under  this  legal  dispensation  we  are  put 


92  THE   LIFE  INDEED 

in  the  class  with  imbeciles  and  lunatics  and  social  wrecks;  it 
is  a  gracious  way  of  holding  us  less  accountable,  and  of  sus- 
pending judgment.  So  the  onward  way  is  still  left  open:  it 
is  not  contemplated  that  the  ruins  should  continue  ruins,  or 
that  the  dead  should  be  beyond  resurrection.  Yet  all  this  does 
not  acquit  the  transgressor,  or  blink  the  sinfulness  of  sin.  It 
is  a  way  of  concluding  all  under  sin,  that  the  gracious  power 
of  the  world  might  have  mercy  upon  all.  And  this  it  does  by 
the  sublimely  simple  way  of  treating  men  not  merely  as  wrecks 
and  ruins,  needing  a  painful  process  of  repair  and  patching  up 
in  kind,  but  as  children,  as  immature,  going  through  a  period 
of  growth  and  schooling  and  evolution,  and  saved  for  better 
things  by  the  hope  that  still  throbs  through  the  tissues  of  his 
immaturity.  In  other  words,  this  mercy  inlaid  in  creation  is 
essentially  a  prophecy  of  things  to  come,  and  a  waiting  for  it. 
Consider  at  what  a  deadlock  the  soul  of  man  would  be  if  it 
were  not  for  this  protecting  aegis  of  mercy,  this  perennial 
prophecy  of  a  fuller  and  more  adult  manhood,  to  supplement 
what  the  law  can  give.  Think  first  of  the  scientific  conscious- 
ness it  would  engender;  we  can  see  this  by  looking  at  the  con- 
sciousness actually  engendered  in  the  sad  middle  years  of  the 
nineteenth  century,  when  agnosticism  and  materialism  spread 
like  a  pall  over  everything.  You  recall  that  sombre  interview 
with  George  Eliot,  the  priestess  of  the  new  science,  which  the 
late  Frederic  Myers  has  left  on  record.  "I  remember,"  he 
says,  "how  I  walked  with  her  once  in  the  Fellows'  Garden  of 
Trinity,  on  an  evening  of  rainy  May;  and  she,  stirred  some- 
what beyond  her  wont,  and  taking  as  her  text  the  three  words 
which  have  been  used  so  often  as  the  inspiring  trumpet-calls 
of  men,  —  the  words  God,  Immortality,  Duty,  —  pronounced, 
with  terrible  earnestness,  how  inconceivable  was  the  first,  how 
unbelievable  the  second,  and  yet  how  peremptory  and  absolute 
the  third.  Never,  perhaps,  have  sterner  accents  affirmed  the 
sovereignty  of  impersonal  and  unrecompensing  law.  I  listened, 
and  night  fell;  her  grave,  majestic  countenance  turned  toward 
me  like  a  Sibyl's  in  the  gloom;  it  was  as  though  she  withdrew 
from  my  grasp,  one  by  one,  the  two  scrolls  of  promise,  and 


NEARING   THE  FULNESS  OF  THE   TIME    93 

left  me  the  third  scroll  only,  awful  with  inevitable  fates.  And 
when  we  stood  at  length  and  parted,  amid  that  columnar 
circuit  of  the  forest-trees,  beneath  the  last  twilight  of  starless 
skies,  I  seemed  to  be  gazing,  like  Titus  at  Jerusalem,  on  va- 
cant seats  and  empty  halls,  —  on  a  sanctuary  with  no  Presence 
to  hallow  it,  and  heaven  left  lonely  of  a  God."  Infinitely  sad 
this,  sadder  even  than  Koheleth  or  Omar;  when  man  gets  into 
his  inner  spirit  and  life  the  sense  of  his  prison  and  treadmill 
existence.  Can  we  stop  his  progress  at  this  deadlock;  and  if 
not,  what  more  is  needed,  what  food  for  prophecy  and  hope? 
Clearly,  we  must  not  stop  here. 

Or  take  it  again  when  man  rises  up  against  his  doom,  and 
rebelling  against  that  which  is,  tries  to  bring  about  that  which 
he  deems  ought  to  be.  It  is  the  impulse,  you  know,  of  that 
surging  spirit  in  man  to  sit  in  judgment  on  the  order  of  things 
with  which  he  is  surrounded  and  call  for  a  better  plan;  as 
Omar  Khayyam  puts  it: 

Ah  Love !  could  you  and  I  with  Him  conspire 
To  grasp  this  sorry  Scheme  of  Things  entire, 

Would  not  we  shatter  it  to  bits  —  and  then 
Re-mould  it  nearer  to  the  Heart's  Desire! 

Well,  about  this  too  there  is  the  same  note  of  unfinality,  nay 
of  sheer  childishness  and  callow  wrong-headedness,  as  if  men 
had  to  make  all  their  reforms  by  rule  of  thumb,  and  not  only 
run  the  risk  but  inevitably  incur  the  discount  of  evil  on  one 
side  or  the  other,  excesses  and  vagaries,  false  starts  and  an 
impulse  generally  unbalanced.  You  remember  how  it  was  with 
the  French  Revolution,  before  men  got  their  noble  plea  of 
liberty,  equality,  and  fraternity  naturalized  in  the  heart  of 
society;  why,  they  are  working  at  it  yet.  The  Russian  nation 
seems  to  be  bungling  its  job  of  revolution  in  much  the  same 
way;  full  of  un tempered  hopes  and  blind  desires,  like  so  many 
children.  It  was  only  the  other  day  that  Count  Witte  said 
this  of  them:  "The  only  people  who  acted  in  their  own  in- 
terests were  the  revolutionists.  They  knew  what  they  wanted. 
They  chose  the  most  effective  means  to  attain  it,  and  they  are 
capable  of  adopting  these  means  even  at  the  price  of  heavy 


94  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

sacrifices.  The  revolutionists  hide  all  their  quarrels  and  ani- 
mosities and  act  together  for  the  end  they  have  in  view,  which 
spells  destruction.  Out  of  the  resultant  chaos  they  promise 
a  new  world  and  an  earthly  paradise."  Is  not  all  this  like  the 
untempered  judgment  of  an  untrained  child,  or  an  unripe 
youth,  not  yet  fit  to  enter  on  his  heritage  of  freedom?  And 
if  we  would  prophesy,  have  we  the  basis  for  believing  that  some 
time  the  spirit  of  man  shall  work  in  the  sanity  of  perfect  bal- 
ance and  adultness,  master  of  himself  and  his  destiny?  It  is 
a  grave  question,  is  it  not,  at  this  age  of  the  world? 

Or  take  once  more  that  highest  product  of  the  reaction  of 
the  manhood  spirit  on  his  world  of  law:  the  man  who  will  not 
be  a  slave  but  an  athlete,  accepting  his  conditions  in  all  their 
burdensomeness,  and  standing  up  courageous  and  cheerful, 
saying  "I  can."  We  honor  such  character;  it  is  what  we  would 
all  be.  But  here  again  we  note  the  unfinality,  the  need  of  a 
supplementing  and  compensating  prophecy.  "The  moralist," 
says  Professor  James,  "must  hold  his  breath  and  keep  his 
muscles  tense;  and  so  long  as  this  athletic  attitude  is  possible 
all  goes  well  —  morality  suffices.  But  the  athletic  attitude 
tends  ever  to  break  down,  and  it  inevitably  does  break  down 
even  in  the  most  stalwart,  when  the  organism  begins  to  decay, 
or  when  morbid  fears  invade  the  mind.  To  suggest  personal 
will  and  effort  to  one  all  sicklied  o'er  with  the  sense  of  ir- 
remediable impotence  is  to  suggest  the  most  impossible  of 
things.  What  he  craves  is  to  be  consoled  in  his  very  power- 
lessness,  to  feel  that  the  spirit  of  the  universe  recognizes  and 
secures  him,  all  decaying  and  failing  as  he  is.  Well,  we  are 
all  such  helpless  failures  in  the  last  resort.  The  sanest  and 
best  of  us  are  of  one  clay  with  lunatics  and  prison  inmates, 
and  death  finally  runs  the  robustest  of  us  down.  And  when- 
ever we  feel  this,  such  a  sense  of  the  vanity  and  provisionality 
of  our  voluntary  career  comes  over  us  that  all  our  morality 
appears  but  as  a  plaster  hiding  a  sore  it  can  never  cure,  and 
all  our  well-doing  as  the  hollowest  substitute  for  that  well- 
being  that  our  lives  ought  to  be  grounded  in,  but  alas,  are  not." 

It  is  precisely  on  this  athletic  plane  that  the  Old  Testament 


NEARING   THE  FULNESS  OF  THE   TIME    95 

meets  us  with  its  revelation  of  mercy,  the  mercy  of  treating 
man  as  incomplete,  immature,  waiting  for  larger  things.  Its 
generous  field  of  allowance  is  broad  enough  to  cover  also,  with 
the  rest,  the  athletic  break-down,  on  the  ground  that  it  is  the 
break-down,  the  limitation,  of  youth  and  upward-mounting 
strength.  You  remember  that  sublime  culmination  of  the 
fortieth  of  Isaiah,  where  the  prophet  is  taxing  language  and 
imagery  to  describe  a  living  God  who  "fainteth  not  neither  is 
weary,"  and  who  because  He  can  wait  will  have  His  people 
wait  and  hope  with  Him:  "Even  the  youths,"  he  says,  "shall 
faint  and  be  weary,  and  the  young  men  shall  utterly  fall:  but 
they  that  wait  upon  the  Lord  shall  renew  their  strength;  they 
shall  mount  up  with  wings  as  eagles;  they  shall  run,  and  not 
be  weary;  and  they  shall  walk,  and  not  faint." 

We  are  getting  in  sight  now  of  what  prophecy  is  for,  what  in 
the  large  essential  sense  it  means.  Prophecy  is  the  soul  of  the 
Old  Testament,  making  it,  as  no  other  book  in  the  world  is, 
the  book  of  the  future.  I  am  reverting  here  to  the  older  and 
simpler  idea  of  prophecy,  the  idea  that  comes  unforced  into 
the  mind  of  any  unlettered  man.  Bible  students  and  critics 
are  at  great  pains  nowadays,  you  know,  to  get  an  idea  of 
prophecy  which  will  leave  room  for  a  possible  falsification  of 
specific  prediction:  they  say  that  it  does  not  mean  foretelling 
but  fortelling,  as  of  an  advocate  speaking  for  God,  or  forth- 
telling,  as  of  a  herald  announcing  and  emphasizing  a  message. 
All  this  is  true  enough,  except  the  negative;  prophecy  does  in- 
clude these  things.  But  primarily  I  take  it  to  mean  straight 
foretelling;  it  is  concerned,  in  the  large,  with  predicting  what 
the  spirit  of  man  shall  come  to  when  he  has  survived  his  grop- 
ing callow  youthful  period  and  enters  upon  his  full  heritage 
of  life;  it  is  the  glowing  vision  of  the  poet,  who 

sings  of  what  the  world  will  be 
When  the  years  have  died  away; 

but  it  strikes  hands  also  with  the  view  of  the  evolutionist,  who 
must  needs  see  his  great  river  of  created  life  going  on  ever  to 
more  life  and  fuller.  This,  I  say,  is  the  very  soul  of  the  Old 


96  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

Testament;  its  soul,  just  as  the  rigid  empire  of  law  is  its  body. 
Justice,  righteousness,  obligation  to  rule,  are  in  the  nature  of 
things  as  its  bony  structure,  its  brawn  and  sinew,  its  hands 
and  brain;  but  mercy  and  grace,  the  wise  allowance  that  waits 
for  childhood  to  be  traversed  and  strength  to  come,  is  the  inner 
reserve  of  spirit  informing  and  vitalizing  that  same  nature  of 
things.  Without  this,  creation  would  be  but  half  made,  and 
would  not  be  evolution  at  all.  The  law  of  being  would  be 
there,  but  it  would  harden  into  machinery  and  routine,  always 
grinding  out,  from  generation  to  generation,  the  same  dull  grist. 
You  see  how  it  developed  in  the  Hebrew  nation,  when  after 
Malachi  it  suffered  an  eclipse  of  prophecy  and  entered  upon 
its  night  of  legalism.  Its  Mosaic  regime  developed  an  elaborate 
ceremonialism  and  ecclesiasticism,  and  after  a  little  its  priest- 
hood fell  into  the  hands  of  Sadducees,  who  were  political  aris- 
tocrats and  skeptics,  and  not  spiritually-minded  at  all;  and  so 
the  order  of  things  settled  down  to  live  life  by  frame-work  and 
rule.  You  can  think  what  would  follow  such  a  state  of  things. 
A  certain  public  lecturer  of  whom  I  once  heard,  who  had  to 
repeat  his  carefully  prepared  lecture  several  times  a  week 
during  a  whole  season,  remarked  that  he  got  so  used  to  his 
task  that  he  could  just  set  his  face  going  and  go  off  and  leave 
it.  Something  like  this  is  the  besetting  danger  of  ceremonial- 
ism and  ritual.  Dealing  with  something  changeless,  estab- 
lished, eternally  divine,  it  tends  to  put  this  into  the  automatic 
part  of  our  being,  and  having  set  it  going,  to  go  off  (spiritu- 
ally) and  leave  it.  This  is  no  argument,  of  course,  against 
form  and  ceremony,  but  rather  against  the  indifference  to  its 
vital  core  and  essence.  And  the  corrective  to  this  tendency 
in  the  Hebrew  nation  was  prophecy;  the  essence  of  which, 
speaking  of  Carlyle,  Principal  Shairp  thus  describes:  "In  this 
he  was  akin  to  all  the  prophets,  one  of  their  brotherhood, - 
that  he  maintained  the  spiritual  and  dynamic  forces  in  man 
as  against  the  mechanical."  Thus  it  was  that  through  a  long 
period  prophecy  wrought  among  the  Hebrews  as  the  comple- 
ment and  corrective  of  their  ceremonial  Mosaism,  to  keep  life 
and  religion  genuine.  It  was  the  soul  of  their  Dispensation; 


NEARING   THE  FULNESS  OF  THE   TIME    97 

inspiring  them  onward  to  a  nobler  future,  and  keeping  vital 
the  claims  of  growth  and  spiritual  progress. 

A  question  much  debated  nowadays  is,  why,  instead  of  send- 
ing missionaries  and  interfering  with  the  religious  affairs  of 
other  nations  and  races,  we  should  not  be  content  to  let  them 
remain  as  they  are :  giving  the  Chinaman  his  Confucius,  and 
the  Buddhist  his  legend  of  Gautama,  and  the  Persian  his  ven- 
erable Zoroastrianism,  and  the  Mohammedan  his  Koran,  and 
bidding  them  work  out  their  own  salvation  in  their  own  ethni- 
cal and  temperamental  way.  Do  not  all  these  books  inculcate 
lofty  morality,  and  lay  down  strict  rules  of  worship;  are  not 
all  of  them  books  of  life,  as  their  devotees  have  come  to  see 
life,  and  are  they  not  adapted  to  race  and  climate  and  sphere 
of  ideas?  Well,  I  waive  here  the  practical  test  which  we 
might  well  make,  "By  their  fruits  ye  shall  know  them;"  I 
need  not  open  the  question  which  so  naturally  answers  itself, 
what  kind  of  men,  what  kind  of  ideals,  what  kind  of  society, 
what  stripe  of  civilization,  these  so-called  sacred  books  make. 
It  is  a  deeper  test  that  meets  us  here.  The  thing  that  differ- 
entiates our  Bible  from  all  these  others  —  and  in  this  I  in- 
clude the  Old  Testament  no  whit  less  than  the  New  —  is  the 
fact  that  it  is  preeminently,  uniquely,  the  Book  of  the  Future. 
Some  superintending  Power  and  Wisdom  has  drawn  its  lines 
so  accurately  and  truly  that  it  follows  the  onward-flowing 
current  of  manhood  evolution;  it  deepens  and  broadens 
steadily  forward  toward  more  life  and  fuller,  toward  the  time 
and  summit  where  the  spirit  of  man  shall  be  master  of  his 
life  and  his  fate,  toward  the  Life  Indeed.  In  this  sense  it  is, 
precisely  in  this  sense  of  victorious  evolution,  that  the  Bible, 
from  beginning  to  end,  is  of  prophecy  all  compact.  By  the 
side  of  it  we  place  these  other  books,  and  they  seem  to  have 
been  arrested  in  their  course,  to  be  off  somewhere  in  the  eddies 
of  being,  puddling  and  regurgitating;  not  in  the  majestic  on- 
ward-sweeping main  current.  Look  into  them,  and  you  will 
see  them  taken  up  with  ceremonies,  and  repetitions  of  vain 
words,  and  dull  lists  of  rules,  with  here  and  there,  as  it  were 
fortuitously,  a  glimpse  of  something  beautiful  and  sublime 


98  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

But  there  is  a  sad  lack  of  central  principle  and  motive;  their 
righteousness  is  not  adequately  rooted  in  life  and  character; 
and  they  radiate  not  light  and  inner  truth  but  heat  and 
fanaticism  and  bigotry.  They  are  not  in  the  current  of  the 
future,  the  river  of  evolving  life,  but  only  in  the  eddies  and 
standing  ponds,  where  they  gather  foam  and  dirt  and  slimy 
scum. 

Yet  these  books  have  more  to  say  about  the  Hereafter, 
about  immortality  and  the  mode  of  it,  or  it  may  be  the  nega- 
tion of  it,  than  has  our  Bible.  They  have  created  the  picture 
of  an  existence  beyond  according  to  their  own  image:  prom- 
ising to  the  Mohammedan  a  sensual  and  sensuous  paradise, 
to  the  Egyptian  a  rigid  Rhadamanthine  justice,  to  the  Hindoo, 
with  his  contempt  of  the  body,  a  dreamy  Nirvana,  which  is 
just  the  negation  of  all  energy,  an  apotheosis  of  mental  and 
moral  inaction.  And  all  this  while  the  old  Hebrew  Bible  has 
gone  on,  developing  and  systematizing  its  code  of  law,  accept- 
ing its  rigid  conditions,  toning  up  life  always  by  singing  of 
mercy  and  judgment,  rejoicing  in  a  protecting  God,  and  calling 
for  the  divine  verdict  on  its  own  well-doing;  yet  never  formu- 
lating its  idea  of  immortality,  or  getting  it  into  definite  enough 
shape  to  make  it  a  motive  of  conduct.  The  whole  old  Dis- 
pensation answers  fitly  to  that  idea  of  Koheleth's:  of  a  crea- 
tion with  the  vitalizing  power  of  eternity  in  its  heart,  yet  not 
yet  with  the  clear  sight  of  the  beginning  or  the  end  of  things. 
It  is  consciously  in  an  onward-moving  current  of  being;  and 
instead  of  concerning  itself  with  the  ocean  to  which  it  tends, 
it  is  mainly  concerned  with  keeping  the  law-imbued  current  of 
life  strong  and  just  and  pure. 

Here,  surely,  is  a  remarkable  thing  to  note.  What  is 
prophecy  for,  we  naturally  ask,  but  to  find  out  the  future? 
What  has  man's  impulse  always  been,  but  to  peer  into  the 
beyond,  to  find  something  there  by  which  to  govern  and  di- 
rect his  behavior  here?  Think  of  the  clumsy,  floundering, 
blind-eyed  means  that  men  have  taken  to  ascertain  the  will 
of  the  gods:  magic,  necromancy,  astrology,  the  entrails  of 
beasts,  the  flight  of  birds;  think  of  the  wizards  and  mediums 


NEARING   THE  FULNESS  OF   THE   TIME      99 

and  augurs  and  Delphic  priestesses  that  have  been  interro- 
gated, in  the  desperate  endeavor  to  get  some  light  on  the  fu- 
ture, some  direction  great  or  small,  for  the  guidance  of  life. 
A  sad  revelation,  is  it  not,  of  a  universal  atmosphere,  in  all 
the  ancient  nations,  of  dimness  and  doubt.  But  in  all  this 
you  will  note  one  invariable  thing:  the  future  direction  that 
they  seek  is  the  direction  of  the  man  that  now  is,  seeking  his 
own  sordid  and  earthly  ends;  and  the  life  sought  beyond  is 
a  projection  and  extension  of  this  same  plane  of  being  on  which 
they  are  now  content  to  live,  and  would  live  indefinitely  if  the 
fate  of  untimely  death  were  not  so  sure  to  overtake  them.  It 
is  through  fear  of  death  that  they  are  all  their  lifetime  sub- 
ject to  bondage.  The  trouble  is,  they  haven't  the  use  of  what 
we  have  called  our  biometer;  have  not  the  true  and  growing 
light  on  life  itself.  The  life  that  is,  is  just  as  much  in  the  dark 
as  the  life  that  is  to  be:  and  they  have  lost  both  the  thirst  for 
it  and  the  standard  of  measurement.  The  Hebrews  too,  you 
will  say,  had  their  priestly  oracle,  their  Urim  and  Thummim; 
a  German  professor,  Professor  Siegfried,  has  even  carried  his 
lack  of  the  larger  sense  so  far  as  to  reduce  their  law  itself, 
their  Torah,  primarily  to  decision  by  oracle,  as  if  their  guid- 
ance of  life  footed  back  to  much  the  same  sort  of  inquiry  that 
the  heathen  made  when  they  noted  the  entrails  of  beasts.  But 
from  one  thing,  you  will  note,  the  Hebrew  ideal  was  providen- 
tially saved;  and  it  is  a  wonder  too,  when  we  compare  with 
them  all  the  nations  round  them.  They  would  have  nothing 
to  do  with  necromancy  and  familiar  spirits  and  wizards  that 
peep  and  mutter.  From  the  swamps  of  the  occult  and 
mediumship  they  were  mercifully  preserved.  It  would  seem 
as  if  their  conscious  walk  in  the  presence  and  guidance  of 
Jehovah  made  it  impossible  so  to  reduce  the  dignity  of  life: 
their  ordinary  living,  shot  through  and  through  as  it  was  with 
religious  service,  created  for  them  a  plane  of  larger  being  from 
which  they  could  look  down  on  these  dusky  black  arts  with 
disgust  and  disdain.  Yet  all  this  time  the  eternity  in  their 
heart  was  a  living  prophecy;  it  kept  the  power  of  the  future 
vital.  And  the  future  to  which  they  were  bound  was  ulti- 


ioo  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

mately  a  future  life,  with  all  the  coordinations  and  furnishings 
of  life  in  full  working  order.  They  were  by  no  means  indif- 
ferent to  the  beyond,  though  their  Book  says  so  little  about 
it.  You  remember  how  the  author  of  the  Epistle  to  the  He- 
brews characterizes  those  Old  Testament  worthies  and  their 
manly  yet  always  unsatisfied  fight  for  life.  "They  that  say 
such  things  declare  plainly  that  they  seek  a  country,  a  home. 
And  truly,  if  they  had  been  mindful  of  that  country  from 
whence  they  came  out,  they  might  have  had  opportunity  to 
have  returned.  But  now  they  desire  a  better  country,  that  is, 
an  heavenly:  wherefore  God  is  not  ashamed  to  be  called  their 
God;  for  he  hath  prepared  for  them  a  city."  That  was  the 
deep  and  central  tone  of  the  Old  Testament  heart,  as  it  was 
struggling  and  aspiring  forward  toward  the  fulness  of  the  time. 
The  whole  power  of  immortality  was  there,  vitally  at  work,  in 
a  deathless  energy  of  endeavor  and  faith. 

But  still  working  in  dimness  and  twilight.  Why  was  this, 
we  ask;  why  was  not  the  Holy  City  revealed  at  once?  The 
answer  to  this  question  brings  us  face  to  face  with  the  soul 
of  prophecy.  Something  else  must  be  revealed,  an  indispen- 
sable condition  and  basis,  before  the  city  came  in  sight,  before 
the  spirit  of  man  could  find  or  even  see  its  true  home.  And 
so  you  will  have  noted  that  the  body  of  Old  Testament  proph- 
ecy centres  not  in  a  coming  bliss  or  a  coming  existence  be- 
yond death,  but  in  a  coming  Man.  It  is  Messianic;  it  is 
looking  first  for  a  King  of  life,  an  embodiment  of  full  man- 
hood, a  Personality  from  which  shall  ray  forth  all  the  truth  of 
life,  in  guidance  and  mercy  and  judgment.  "Behold,"  says 
Isaiah,  "a  king  shall  reign  in  righteousness,  and  princes  shall 
rule  in  judgment.  And  a  man  shall  be  as  an  hiding-place  from 
the  wind,  and  a  covert  from  the  tempest;  as  rivers  of  water 
in  a  dry  place,  as  the  shadow  of  a  great  rock  in  a  weary  land." 
Nor  is  this  refuge  and  comfort  all  that  is  prophesied.  The 
great  thing  about  it  is  that  when  the  king  comes  men  shall 
see  things  as  they  are;  shall  see  through  good  and  evil,  and 
false  and  true;  shall  give  things  their  right  names,  and  know 
when  a  man  is  good  and  when  he  is  wicked,  when  large  and 


N EARING   THE  FULNESS  Ol>    TH.E   TIME     101 

generous  and  when  only  small  and  churlish.  In  other  words, 
with  the  coming  of  the  Man  will  come  also  the  true  light  of 
life.  "And  the  eyes  of  them  that  see  shall  not  be  dim,  and 
the  ears  of  them  that  hear  shall  hearken;  the  heart  of  t!he 
rash  also  shall  understand  knowledge,  and  the  tongue  of  the 
stammerers  shall  be  ready  to  speak  plainly.  The  vile  person 
shall  no  more  be  called  liberal,  nor  the  churl  said  to  be  bounti- 
ful. For  the  vile  person  will  speak  villainy,  and  his  heart  will 
work  iniquity,  to  practise  hypocrisy,  and  to  utter  error  against 
the  Lord,  to  make  empty  the  soul  of  the  hungry,  and  he  will 
cause  the  drink  of  the  thirsty  to  fail.  The  instruments  also 
of  the  churl  are  evil:  he  deviseth  wicked  devices  to  destroy 
the  poor  with  lying  words,  even  when  the  needy  speaketh  right. 
But  the  liberal  deviseth  liberal  things;  and  by  liberal  things 
shall  he  stand."  Is  not  this  the  real  light  that  is  needed,  the 
real  illumination  of  prophecy?  What  would  a  city  be  without 
it;  how  could  men  set  up  a  livable  existence  beyond  the  grave 
without  being  first  able  to  see  things  as  they  are,  and  enter 
upon  the  fulness  of  life  as  it  is?  Now  you  see  how  divinely 
wise  a  thing  it  was,  that  the  Old  Testament  did  not  begin  its 
prophecy  with  immortality.  Before  we  can  have  an  immor- 
tality worthy  of  the  name  we  must  first  have  a  manhood 
worthy  of  the  thing,  a  manhood  wise  and  true  and  merciful 
and  strong.  And  this  Messianic  object  is  the  soul  of  prophecy. 
I  cannot  stay  now  to  trace,  much  as  the  subject  invites  it, 
how  this  idea  of  a  coming  Man  was  gradually  freed  from 
littleness  and  limitation;  how  it  was  enlarged  and  enriched 
and  made  glorious,  how  it  became  an  idea  in  which  not  the 
Jews  only  but  all  nations  should  rejoice  and  be  saved,  flocking 
to  Jerusalem  like  doves  to  their  windows,  and  eager  to  bow 
to  the  sway  of  the  coming  King.  The  prophecy,  like  all 
prophecies,  is  sometimes  foreshortened;  and  men's  present 
ideals  cling  to  it;  the  King's  universal  reign  over  mankind  is 
not  without  the  thought  of  conquest,  in  which  he  will  shatter 
the  wicked  in  pieces  like  a  potter's  vessel.  We  know  now  how 
such  prophecy  was  destined  to  come  out;  and  how  the  wicked 
were  to  be  shattered  by  ceasing  to  be  wicked,  and  how  nations 


102  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

were  to  bow  because  it  was  seen  as  their  own  blessedness  and 
emancipation  so  to  do.  All  this  we  can  leave  the  fulness  of 
the  time  to  work  out:  we  have  meanwhile  the  figure  of  the 
coming  Man,  in  whom  manhood  should  have  free  and  full 
course,  and  be  fitted  at  last  for  the  goal,  the  Holy  City  and 
the  commonwealth  beyond. 

But  the  idea  led  on  to  the  depths  of  being  too;  and  it  is 
no  wonder  if  here  the  glowing  heart  of  the  prophet  should 
pause  and  study.  The  coming  Man,  the  Servant  of  Jehovah, 
must  also  suffer;  his  way  could  not  be  all  bliss  and  self-indul- 
gence. Here  is  a  marvelous  revelation  of  the  spirit  of  man 
dreaming  on  things  to  come.  You  remember  how  St.  Peter 
looked  back  on  that  prophetic  time  of  the  Old  Dispensation, 
and  saw  the  prophets  at  work  and  their  body  of  prophecy  as 
it  were  in  the  making.  It  is  on  the  sufferings  of  their  coming 
Man  that  he  sees  them  studying,  that  hardest  thing  to  receive; 
yet  the  spirit  of  Christ  which  was  in  them  seemed  to  demand 
it,  and  they  had  no  thought  of  denial  but  only  of  how  to  fit 
sacrifice  and  humiliation  into  the  times  and  of  the  order  of 
things.  "Of  which  salvation,"  he  says,  "the  prophets  have 
inquired  and  searched  diligently,  who  prophesied  of  the  grace 
that  should  come  unto  you:  searching  what,  or  what  manner 
of  time  the  spirit  of  Christ  which  was  in  them  did  signify, 
when  it  testified  beforehand  the  sufferings  of  Christ,  and  the 
glory  that  should  follow." 

So  it  was:  the  soul  of  prophecy  is  confronting  a  great  abyss 
and  ocean  of  manhood  life;  and  it  studies  it  eagerly  and  de- 
voutly, as  it  finds  itself  borne  onward  toward  the  fulness  of 
the  time.  The  spirit  of  man,  in  that  twilight  period,  has  not 
merely  risen  up  against  its  doom,  nor  has  it  set  itself  idly  to 
forecast  its  future;  it  is  concerned  to  bring  into  order  and  har- 
mony all  the  deeps  of  being  that  the  growing  light  has  revealed, 
all  of  which  manhood  is  capable,  its  joys,  its  honors,  its  suf- 
ferings alike,  as  elements  in  the  way  to  its  ultimate  glory. 


IV 

THE   LAW   OF   THE    SPIRIT   OF   LIFE 

WHAT   VITAL   ELEMENTS   INHERE   IN  THE  ADULT  LIFE 
THAT  MANHOOD   IS  APPROACHING 

I.    THE  SECOND  BIRTH 
II.    THE  OUTWARD  CURRENT 
III.    THE  EVIDENCE  OF  THINGS  NOT  SEEN 


IV 

THE   LAW  OF  THE   SPIRIT   OF   LIFE 

IT  MAKES  all  the  difference  in  the  world,  in  our  estimate 
of  the  Life  Indeed,  whether  we  are  at  a  point  where  we 
can  look  back  and  down  upon  it,  as  from  a  more  elevated 
and  sunlit  region,  or  are  still  plodding  forward  and  upward 
toward  it,  as  it  were  through  dim  defiles  and  over  tortuous 
and  flinty  trails,  where  we  come  only  here  and  there  upon 
fleeting  glimpses  of  the  outlook,  as  it  were  by  lights  broken 
and  withdrawn.  Or  to  put  it  in  the  figure  we  have  been  using, 
it  makes  all  the  difference  whether  we  see  life  by  daylight  or 
in  the  uncertain  gloaming.  The  world's  realization  of  life  must 
needs  come  in  this  way:  first  the  twilight,  then  the  dawn;  first 
the  natural,  as  St.  Paul  says,  after  that  the  spiritual.  We  have 
seen  the  struggling  spirit  of  man  reacting  dimly  on  his  world 
of  environment,  consciously  incomplete  and  faulty,  shaping 
ideals  of  mercy  and  judgment  in  view  of  what  was  yet  to  be, 
ideals  which  gradually  rounded  into  a  prophecy  of  a  coming 
manhood,  in  whose  fulness  of  life  men  could  see  things  as  they 
are.  We  are  ready  to  take  up  the  consideration  of  this  now, 
as  our  next  historical  step  forward;  but  first  let  us  take  a 
breathing-spell  to  look  round  us  a  little  and  see  where  we  have 
been  and  what  the  daybreak  reveals.  You  remember  how 
simply  Bunyan  describes  this  outlook  and  breathing-spell,  in 
the  journey  of  his  Pilgrim;  it  came  after  the  Pilgrim  had  been 
alone  all  night  in  the  Valley  of  the  Shadow  of  Death,  and  just 
as  he  began  to  be  cheered  by  the  voice  of  one  going  on  before. 

So  he  went  on  and  called  to  him  that  was  before;  but  he  knew  not  what 
to  answer,  for  that  he  also  thought  himself  to  be  alone.  And  by  and  by  the 
day  broke.  Then  said  Christian:  "He  hath  turned  the  shadow  of  death  into 
the  morning." 

Now  morning  being  come,  he  looked  back,  not  out  of  desire  to  return, 

105 


io6  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

but  to  see,  by  the  light  of  the  day,  what  hazards  he  had  gone  through  in  the 
dark.  So  he  saw  more  perfectly  the  ditch  that  was  on  the  one  hand,  and 
the  quag  that  was  on  the  other;  also  how  narrow  the  way  was  which  led 
betwixt  them  both;  also  now  he  saw  the  hobgoblins  and  satyrs  and  dragons 
of  the  pit,  but  all  afar  off,  for  after  break  of  day  they  came  not  nigh. 
Yet  they  were  discovered  to  him  according  to  that  which  is  written,  "He 
discovereth  deep  things  out  of  darkness,  and  bringeth  out  to  light  the 
shadow  of  death." 

Now  was  Christian  much  affected  with  his  deliverance  from  all  the  dangers 
of  his  solitary  way,  which  dangers,  though  he  feared  them  more  before,  yet 
he  saw  them  more  clearly  now,  because  the  light  of  the  day  made  them 
conspicuous  to  him.  And  about  this  time  the  sun  was  rising,  and  this  was 
another  mercy  to  Christian;  for  you  must  note  that  though  the  first  part 
of  the  Valley  of  the  Shadow  of  Death  was  dangerous,  yet  this  second  part, 
which  he  was  yet  to  go,  was,  if  possible,  far  more  dangerous;  for  from  the 
place  where  he  now  stood,  even  to  the  end  of  the  valley,  the  way  was  all 
along  set  so  full  of  snares,  traps,  gins,  and  nets  here,  and  so  full  of  pits, 
pitfalls,  deep  holes,  and  shelvings  down  there,  that,  had  it  now  been  dark, 
as  it  was  when  he  came  the  first  part  of  the  way,  had  he  had  a  thousand 
souls,  they  had  in  reason  been  cast  away.  But,  as  I  said,  just  now  the  sun 
was  rising.  Then  said  he:  "His  candle  shineth  on  my  head,  and  by  his  light 
I  go  through  darkness." 

To  name  the  thing  that  we  are  to  consider  in  this  breathing- 
spell  of  ours,  I  have  chosen  a  phrase  of  St.  Paul's,  "The  law  of 
the  spirit  of  life";  we  want  to  know,  now  that  we  approach  the 
adult  life  so  long  prophesied,  what  vital  elements  inhere  in  it. 
These  have  been  there  working  in  the  dimness,  all  the  while, 
struggling  toward  the  dawn,  putting  forth  blind  and  doubtful 
energies;  like  Milton's  lion  in  the  creation,  pawing  to  get  free 
their  hinder  parts.  As  with  Bunyan's  Pilgrim,  the  way 
hitherto  has  been  shadowed  by  death;  but  we  are  coming  in 
sight  of  a  Man,  say  rather  of  a  manhood,  whose  mission  and 
function  it  is  to  "deliver  them  who  through  fear  of  death  were 
all  their  lifetime  subject  to  bondage."  In  other  words,  we 
stand  now  on  the  threshold  of  the  solution  stage  of  life,  in 
which,  as  prophesied,  we  can  see  and  discount  things  as  they 
are;  and  the  first  thing  we  find  here  is,  that  as  the  growing 
spirit  of  man  "dares  more  and  more  to  love  and  trust  instead 
of  to  fear  and  fight,"  the  uncouth  objects  of  fear,  like  Bunyan's 
hobgoblins,  slink  away  into  their  native  gloom,  themselves 
afraid  of  daylight.  "The  law  of  the  spirit  of  life,"  as  St.  Paul 


THE  LAW  OF  THE  SPIRIT  OF  LIFE       107 

says,  ".    .    .  hath  made  me  free  from  the  law  of  sin  and 
death." 

I  think  that  when  the  apostle  penned  that  pregnant  phrase 
he  was  well  aware  of  the  latent  contradiction  of  terms  that  was 
in  it,  and  that  he  took  this  way  of  asserting  its  final  reconcile- 
ment. The  spirit  of  life,  being  spirit,  connotes  perfect  free- 
dom of  will,  freedom  from  what  has  bound  and  impeded,  free- 
dom to  do  as  we  please.  Nay,  he  says  it  is  the  thing  that  makes 
free  from  the  old  law  that  has  fettered  and  terrified  us.  The 
vision  of  freedom,  liberty,  is  what  nerves  and  inspires  pro- 
gressive peoples  and  revolutionists;  yet  in  its  cosmic  sense1 
freedom  is  one  of  the  three  things,  the  others  being  God  and  im- 
mortality, which  to  men  like  Professor  Haeckel  are  absolutely 
inconceivable.  I  need  not  remind  you  further  of  the  libraries 
that  have  been  written  on  the  question  whether  the  spirit  of 
man  is  free,  or  whether  in  reality  he  is  only  a  kind  of  automa- 
ton, worked  by  fated  laws  of  bent  and  heredity,  and  having  a 
false  sense  of  freedom.  With  the  involvements  of  this  problem, 
its  physics  and  metaphysics,  men  have  become  so  tangled  and 
baffled,  that  it  has  come  to  be  taken  for  granted  as  one  of  the 
insoluble  things.  Perhaps  it  is  temerity  to  touch  upon  it  here; 
but  St.  Paul's  bold  phrase  helps  us  see,  I  think,  where  to  place 
it.  The  whole  problem  belongs  to  the  impedimenta  of  the 
lower  and  twilight  stratum,  to  that  level  of  life  whereon,  as  a 
slave  and  prisoner,  man  obeys  one  law  with  the  beasts  and 
lies  down  in  the  same  grave.  We  have  seen  how  little  this 
animal  or  even  intellectual  stratum  yielded  for  immortality; 
it  yields  just  as  little  for  real  freedom.  It  is  no  wonder  Pro- 
fessor Haeckel  denies  freedom  to  the  human;  his  scheme  of 
life  cannot  see  above  the  eyes  and  the  finer  brute.  But  let 
the  soul  of  man  once  reach  the  higher  level,  where  the  instinct 
of  his  being  is  the  spirit  of  life,  and  the  bafflement  disappears, 
the  problem  is  no  longer  a  problem.  Freedom,  the  manhood 
will  emancipated  from  bondage  and  fetters,  becomes  the  ac- 
tual, luminous,  boundless  fact.  Yet  just  at  this  point 
and  emphasizing  it,  St.  Paul's  paradox  and  contradiction 
of  terms  comes  in.  That  spirit  of  life,  ideally  free  as  it  is,  is 


io8  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

still  the  law  of  the  spirit  of  life;  Scripture  applies  to  it  also 
another  paradoxical  phrase,  the  law  of  liberty.  It  is  not  ca- 
price, not  licence,  not  anarchy;  being  still  law  it  is  inflexibly 
loyal  to  order  and  the  fruitful  calculable  ongoings  of  the  uni- 
verse; still  a  higher  law  even  when  it  boldly  ventures  on  what 
has  been  called  the  higher  lawlessness.  What  was  before  sub- 
servient to  routine  and  the  behest  of  an  alien  will,  is 
now  wedded  to  the  chosen  wisdom  of  life.  So  we  have  not 
risen  out  of  the  cosmic  empire  of  law;  rather  the  law  of  our 
being  is  honored  and  fulfilled  now  as  it  never  was  before,  and 
the  weights  and  sins  which  so  easily  beset  us  are  laid  aside 
for  wings  and  the  eager  strength  to  run  a  race  and  win. 

This  is  hard  to  understand  perhaps,  just  as  the  reconcile- 
ment of  any  two  mutually  exclusive  ideas  into  a  larger  inclu- 
sive one  always  is,  until  we  have  examined  its  steps  and 
elements;  wherefore  I  must  beg  your  patience  through  the 
chapter.  Meanwhile  an  illustration  or  two  drawn  from  other 
spheres  of  life  may  serve  to  show  how  real  is  the  principle 
we  are  establishing.  I  was  listening  a  few  weeks  ago  to  a 
lecture  on  Greek  art,  in  which  the  lecturer  showed  by  word 
and  picture  how  up  to  a  certain  point  of  development  the 
artist,  not  yet  master  of  his  secret,  was  bound  by  conventions 
and  prescriptions  and  shop  rules,  the  exacting  laws  of  his 
trade;  and  how  accordingly  every  line,  though  faultlessly 
correct,  was  stiff,  angular,  as  it  were  concealed  in  dead 
formalism.  Then  all  at  once  there  seemed  to  come  a  time 
when  the  artist,  impelled  by  a  more  masterful  initiative,  began 
to  make  free  with  his  rules,  and  dared  in  a  higher  interest  and 
vision  to  disobey  them;  and  lo,  the  marble  began  to  palpitate 
with  naturalness  and  strength  and  the  suggestion  of  breathing 
life.  It  was  the  bondage  to  time-worn  law  and  convention 
passing  into  freedom.  In  every  great  art  it  is  so.  In  our  art 
of  life,  too,  I  find  a  curious  adumbration  of  this,  in  Koheleth's 
strange  counsel  to  man  not  to  be  too  righteous  and  thereby 
undo  himself,  and  not  to  be  too  wicked  either  and  so  die  be- 
fore his  time,  but  to  let  a  sincere  reverence  be  his  guide.  "It 
is  good,"  he  says,  "that  thou  lay  hold  of  this,  and  from  that, 


THE  LAW  OF   THE   SPIRIT  OF  LIFE       109 

too,  refrain  not  thy  hand,  for  he  that  feareth  God  shall  come 
forth  of  them  all."  Do  we  not  perceive  here  the  free  spirit  of 
life  making  its  presence  felt?  Koheleth  would  have  his  man 
an  artist  in  life,  a  master  workman,  no  more  a  slave  to  dead 
rules  of  righteousness  than  to  disintegrating  licence  of  wicked- 
ness; he  must  be  above  his  rules,  not  beneath  them;  so  that 
in  his  masterfulness  like  Beethoven  he  could  break  the  laws 
of  the  pedants  and  gain  his  sublimer  effect,  or  like  Cromwell 
could  cast  the  accepted  laws  of  war  to  the  winds  and  win  his 
victories.  "It  is  magnificent,  but  it  is  not  war,"  was  once  said 
of  such  untrammeled  boldness.  And  there  must  come  a  time, 
it  would  seem,  when  the  growing  spirit  of  man,  if  he  would 
reach  the  height  of  masterful  personality,  in  the  image  of  God, 
must  boldly  enter  on  a  stage  of  being  where  he  is  larger  than 
his  rules,  his  codes  of  law,  his  conventions,  his  prescriptions; 
where  the  free  spirit  that  is  in  him  shall  be  his  wise  and  suffi- 
cient guide.  There  is  something  of  the  artist  ideal  here,  the 
ideal  of  the  master  workman.  It  is  a  phase,  or  rather  it  is 
the  core  and  centre,  of  the  conflict  and  alliance  of  law  and 
liberty.  This  is  what  we  mean  by  the  law  of  the  spirit  of  life. 
But  how  to  get  the  transition  made;  what  elements  of  the 
spirit  of  man  to  lay  hold  of  and  appropriate,  —  this  is  the 
great  question  that  rises  here,  like  a  mystic  barrier  to  sur- 
mount. Too  evidently  man  is  facing  not  only  an  epoch  but 
a  grave  crisis  in  his  evolution.  His  spirit  has  all  along  reacted 
bravely  against  his  limitations  and  his  doom ;  but  on  the  whole 
dimly  and  uncertainly,  for  the  onsets  of  the  animal  and  the 
worldly  have  beset  him  behind  and  before.  Use  his  being's 
law  as  he  will,  yet  he  is  just  as  truly  used  by  it,  often  to  alien 
and  evil  purpose,  and  always  in  the  shadow  of  untimely  death. 
The  slave  bends  supinely  under;  and  even  the  athlete,  re- 
joicing in  his  strength,  breaks  down  eventually.  To  pass  from 
the  sphere  of  well-doing  to  the  sphere  of  well-being,  from  the 
under  side  of  his  environment  to  the  upper,  where  even  weak- 
ness may  have  its  prevailing  fibre  of  strength;  this  is  the  prob- 
lem that  confronts  us  here,  and  it  is  the  crucial  problem  of 
the  Life  Indeed.  There  is  a  mystic  door  to  open,  a  veil  to 


i  io  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

rend,  a  Jordan  to  cross.  Evolution,  no  less  than  revelation, 
demands  it;  and  if  the  solution  does  not  lie  on  the  other  side, 
then  there  is  no  solution  of  the  life-problem  at  all.  Take  it 
how  we  will,  we  must,  in  order  to  go  on,  make  incursion  here 
into  the  unseen;  for  it  is  there  that  the  spirit  of  life  prevails 
and  prospers. 

It  is  here  that  evolutionary  science  has  shrunk  back  baffled; 
for  here  it  is  that  we  must  lay  aside  microscope  and  test-tube 
and  betake  ourselves  to  wholly  new  apparatus  and  method  of 
approach.  But  it  does  not  beseem  us  to  despair,  even  as  scien- 
tific explorers,  as  if  here  evolution  must  stop. 

What,  my  soul?  see  thus  far  and  no  farther?  when  doors  great  and  small, 
Nine-and-ninety  flew  ope  at  our  touch,  should  the  hundredth  appall? 
In  the  least  things  have  faith,  yet  distrust  in  the  greatest  of  all? 

li 

If,  as  we  have  been  assured,  "the  spirit  of  man  is  the  candle 
of  the  Lord,  searching  all  the  inward  parts  of  the  body,"  let 
us  not  discard  our  sublimely  simple  apparatus,  here  where  it 
is  most  needed.  Especially  so  as  our  alleged  resource  is  so 
ample.  Here  is  our  chance  to  consult  the  scientific  text-book 
of  the  ages  and  eternities;  to  see  whether,  as  asserted,  the 
Word  of  God  proves  itself  such  by  being  "quick  and  powerful, 
and  sharper  than  any  two-edged  sword,  piercing  even  to  the 
dividing  asunder  of  soul  and  spirit,  and  of  the  joints  and  mar- 
row, and  is  a  discerner  of  the  thoughts  and  intents  of  the 
heart."  If  we  have  not  our  instrument  of  research  here,  we 
have  none  at  all.  Let  us  give  it  a  fair  test  and  employment. 

According  to  its  concrete  folk-idiom,  which  has  been  fol- 
lowed out  in  elaborate  schemes  of  theology  and  soteriology, 
the  way,  until  a  few  decades  ago,  has  seemed  very  clear.  It 
has  crystallized  in  what  has  been  called  the  plan  of  salvation. 
But  somehow  since,  as  I  believe,  an  all-wise  Providence  has 
framed  the  mind  of  our  age  to  a  scientific  temper  and  exaction, 
a  haze  has  seemed  to  gather  round  this  venerable  scheme  of 
things.  The  solution  it  provides  seems  to  be  exclusively  an 
affair  of  miracle  and  supernatural  extrication;  a  deus  ex  ma- 
china,  an  unmotived  irruption  from  without,  through  the  arbi- 


THE  LAW  OF   THE   SPIRIT  OF  LIFE       in 

trary  agency  of  the  coming  of  Christ,  with  its  complex  train  of 
redemption  and  atonement  and  justification  and  sanctification. 
All  this  looks  like  an  opus  operatum,  effected  by  one  trans- 
cendent Being,  whether  more  God  or  man  we  can  hardly  judge, 
and  offered  to  us  to  take  or  leave,  but  in  any  case  as  our  only 
resource.  Nay,  we  have  been  so  assured  that  He  did  all  the 
work,  and  that  nothing  either  great  or  small  remained  for  us 
to  do,  that  many  have  profanely  said:  "Let  Him  work;  it  is 
only  a  Hebrew  and  Jewish  scheme  after  all,  and  we  have  no 
call  to  bother  ourselves  about  it.  If  He  has  done  it  all,  why, 
we  may  as  well  take  His  interpreters  at  their  word,  and  do 
nothing."  Now  far  be  it  from  me  to  reject  or  caricature  this 
so-called  plan  of  salvation;  my  concern  is  not  to  prove  it  false, 
but  to  find  in  what  sense  it  is  true.  Still,  there  is  this  un- 
deniable inertia  and  indifference  to  this  scheme  to  be  reckoned 
with;  we  need,  if  it  is  true  and  has  still  the  potency  of  appeal 
to  men,  to  translate  it  into  modern  and  scientific  terms.  And 
this  we  can  best  do  by  heeding  the  wholesome  demand  of  the 
age.  Our  instinctive  desire,  and  it  is  no  profane  one  or  skep- 
tical, calls  for  a  solution  not  by  an  irruption  from  without  but 
by  an  evolution  of  forces  stored  within.  We  want  to  see  the 
way  to  the  summit  of  manhood  continuous  and  growing,  with 
causes  and  potencies  all  in  their  ordained  place  and  doing  their 
work  as  it  were  by  laws  of  nature.  In  other  words,  it  is  the 
law  of  the  spirit  of  life,  in  its  evolutionary  order,  that  we  want, 
not  an  arbitrary  miracle.  To  this,  in  our  present  temper,  we 
can  commit  ourselves;  and  if,  as  it  comes  about,  it  reveals  a 
continuous  road  from  that  remote  time  when  the  spirit  of  God 
brooded  on  the  face  of  the  waters,  or  if  at  the  far  culmination 
of  personality  it  evidences  itself  as  interacting  with  the  divine, 
why,  so  much  the  better.  Men  have  no  objection  to  being  sons 
of  God,  in  character  and  spirit  as  they  already  are  in  skill  and 
inventiveness  and  reason;  they  only  wish,  in  the  way  that  our 
age's  temper  has  made  imperative,  to  trace  the  real  derivation 
and  family  likeness. 

This  is  why  I  have  been  searching  the  elements  of  the  Life 
Indeed  at  such  length  and  detail  through  the  obscure  twilight 


H2  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

period.  It  was  all-important  that  when  the  fulness  of  the  time 
was  revealed,  we  should  be  duly  aware  of  what  it  was  that 
gradually  and  growingly  filled  the  time.  It  was  the  endeavor 
to  see  how  truly  the  evolution  of  manhood  is  orderly  and  rea- 
sonable, and  how  when  the  freedom  came  it  should  still  include, 
in  unimpaired  operation,  all  the  wealth  and  worth  of  its  ante- 
cedent law. 

But,  now  that  we  have  traversed  that  stratum  and  stand 
looking  over  into  the  dispensation  of  the  fulness  of  the  times, 
we  are  more  aware  than  ever,  in  spite  of  the  continuous  prog- 
ress of  spirituality  that  we  have  noted,  that  we  are  facing  a 
vital  crisis  in  the  uprise  of  manhood.  There  is,  as  I  have  said, 
a  mysterious  door  yet  to  open,  the  hundredth  and  last  after 
the  ninety-and-nine,  a  door  into  the  upper  spiritual  room. 
There  is  a  note  of  the  mystic  and  transcendental  about  it,  not 
to  say  of  the  supernatural.  The  emergence  from  blind  fate  to 
illuminate  destiny,  from  prison  to  freedom,  from  the  natural 
to  the  spiritual,  is  as  it  were  the  birth  of  a  new  man,  the  Super- 
man, as  our  latest  time  is  beginning  dimly  to  call  it.  Strange, 
is  it  not,  by  the  way,  that  quite  apart  from  Bible  revelation, 
men  should  have  come  to  make  such  confession  that  the  old 
moral  and  social  order  has  exhausted  its  potencies,  and  to  call 
on  the  unseen  to  help  them  out?  The  old  world  of  social  con- 
ventions and  manners,  of  organized  good  customs,  is  growing 
decrepit;  and  men,  created  upright,  have  sought  out  so  many 
inventions,  through  which  even  organized  morals  may  become 
honeycombed  with  selfish  evils,  that  we  must  needs  have  a 
Superman,  whose  habitat  is  a  radically  transformed  world. 
The  scenery,  the  cherished  ideals  and  impulses,  nay  the  very 
direction  and  current  of  things,  must  be  as  it  were  metamor- 
phosed. Call  this  miracle  or  evolution,  call  it  divine  or  human, 
men  of  sober  evolutionary  mind  are  coming  to  see  that  there 
is  this  amazing  transition  to  be  effected,  if  manhood  would 
reach  the  height  of  its  craving  and  promise. 

It  is  just  at  this  point  that  our  scripture  text-book  puts  the 
supreme  vital  crisis;  here  that  it  puts  the  one  grand  uprise, 
as  momentous,  as  mysterious,  as  far-reaching  as  we  have 


THE  LAW  OF   THE   SPIRIT  OF  LIFE       113 

deemed  the  transition  to  be  from  earth  to  heaven;  nay,  in  the 
light  and  power  of  it  this  latter  fades  into  insignificance,  and 
death  itself  is  said  to  be  abolished.  Right  at  this  point  it  is 
that  the  solution  comes  in  sight;  and  I  solicit  your  patience  if 
I  take  pains  and  space  to  define  it.  I  do  not  think  that  either 
science  or  theology  has  taken  anything  like  adequate  account 
of  this  tremendous  Biblical  view  of  things.  We  could  not  ex- 
pect science  to  have  done  so,  perhaps ;  for  its  field  of  biological 
vision  is  so  filled  with  the  life  of  the  body  that  necessarily  its 
supreme  crisis  is  physical  death;  or,  if  it  has  gone  into  the 
higher  evolution,  it  has  used  up  its  insight  on  the  phenomena 
of  human  consciousness,  and  does  not  project  its  cares  beyond. 
Consciousness  —  that  is  only  the  bare  background;  the  frame- 
work in  which  all  that  is  moral,  spiritual,  and  therefore  truly 
vital,  is  enclosed.  Theology,  too,  has  been  so  mixed  up  with 
law  and  grace,  faith  and  works,  morals  and  redemption,  and 
has  made  life  depend  on  such  diverse  not  to  say  discordant 
things,  that  we  hardly  know  whether  it  is  more  concerned  to 
get  a  man  good  enough,  that  is,  church-going  and  law-abiding 
enough,  to  squeak  into  heaven  through  his  works,  or  to  make 
him  cling  frantically  to  the  skirts  of  a  historic  Personage,  and 
thereby  get  a  pull,  so  to  say,  with  the  final  Dispenser  of  des- 
tiny. In  any  case  the  moment  of  physical  death  bulks  so  large 
in  the  scheme,  that  it  is  virtually  taken  as  the  point  where 
everything  is  irrevocably  fixed  and  determined.  They  have 
no  real  conception  of  resurrection,  except  a  speculative  and 
spectacular  resurrection  somewhere  beyond.  Now  do  not  put 
me  in  the  ranks  of  the  scoffers  for  describing  the  situation  so. 
Science  and  theology  are  both  right  enough,  perhaps,  according 
to  their  light.  But  you  see  they  have  neither  of  them  disen- 
tangled the  spiritual  from  the  natural  enough  to  see  what  the 
real  trend  of  things  is.  And  indeed,  we  must  not  blame  them. 
They  have  all  the  complexities  of  earth  to  reckon  with. 
The  spirit  of  man  is  still  in  a  material  body,  as  it  were  in  its 
embryonic  stage,  drawing  placental  nourishment  from  a  world 
of  sense  and  morals  and  law;  every  spirit  must  get  its  pre- 
natal education;  and  not  a  jot  nor  tittle  can  pass  until  all  is 


U4  ?HE  LIFE  INDEED 

fulfilled.  It  will  not  make  matters  less  clear,  however,  but 
more  so,  if  we  escape  for  a  while  from  these  thickets  of  the- 
ology and  science  to  the  broad  open  where  the  spirit  of  man, 
having  surmounted  the  twilight  and  bondage  stratum,  enters 
royally  on  its  birthright  of  freedom  and  adultness.  Here  is 
the  birth  of  the  new  man;  here  it  is  that  life  and  immortality 
emerge  to  light;  here  then  is  the  real  vital  crisis  and  spirit. 

It  is  with  the  incarnation  of  this  spirit  of  life  in  a  Supreme 
Man,  in  a  perfect  Manhood,  that  prpphecy,  as  we  have  seen, 
is  centrally  concerned;  not  with  the  unseen  future,  or  with 
mystic  states  of  being,  but  first  of  all  with  a  manhood  worthy 
to  possess  and  glorify  the  future.  The  soul's  home,  as  the 
prophets  deeply  saw,  lay  in  this.  That  was  the  wise  order  of 
things.  Get  this  object  effected,  and  the  rest  follows  by 
natural  consequence.  We  saw,  though  too  meagrely  detailed, 
how  this  healthy  previsional  instinct,  which  in  Shakespeare's 
phrase  we  may  call 

the    prophetic    soul 
Of  the  wide  world  dreaming  on  things  to  come, 

approached  its  object  not  by  drawing  imaginative  pictures  of 
His  person  and  kingly  trappings,  nor  by  casting  horoscopes  of 
His  exact  times.  We  belittle  Messianic  prophecy  unspeakably 
by  making  it  focus  in  such  casual  things  as  these.  Rather, 
the  prophets  were  interrogating  the  spirit  of  life  that  was  in 
them,  the  spirit  of  grace  and  mercy  and  sacrifice,  and  rounding 
its  majestic  demands  into  one  personality;  and  when  they  gave 
this  personality  a  title,  Messiah,  the  Anointed  One,  it  was 
really  the  name  of  that  fulness  and  masterfulness  toward  which 
all  the  avenues  of  their  being  conducted,  that  representative 
completeness  of  their  manhood  whom  they  could  anoint  as 
Pattern  and  Head,  —  Prophet  to  inspire,  Priest  to  atone,  King 
to  receive  loyalty  and  fealty.  It  was  the  spirit  of  life  in  them 
coming  to  concrete  expression;  or  as  St.  Peter  defined  it  when 
he  looked  in  upon  them  at  work,  the  spirit  of  Christ,  the  su- 
preme manhood,  itself.  Here  is  a  significant  thing.  The  spirit 
of  life  that  was  stirring  there,  so  long  before  Jesus,  was  al- 


THE  LAW  OF   THE   SPIRIT  OF  LIFE       115 

ready  the  spirit  of  Christ,  and  so  of  the  highest,  freest  life, 
reverently  interrogating  its  ideals,  and  trying  to  fit  these  into 
the  times,  and  not  without  amazed  wonder  at  the  solemn  in- 
volvements of  them.  All  this  is  of  the  preparation,  the  slow 
making  of  man,  by  the  shaping  touch  of  the  spirit. 

Man  as  yet  is  being  made,  and  ere  the  crowning  Age  of  ages, 

Shall  not  aeon  after  aeon  pass  and  touch  him  into  shape? 

All  about  him  shadow  still,  but,  while  the  races  flower  and  fade, 

Prophet-eyes  may  catch  a  glory  slowly  gaining  on  the  shade, 
Till  the  peoples  all  are  one,  and  all  their  voices  blend  in  choric 
Hallelujah  to  the  Maker,  "It  is  finish'd.     Man  is  made." 

But  we  have  not  to  postpone  all  vision  to  the  far  future.  The 
spirit  of  life  is  already  so  aware  of  itself  and  its  vital  principle 
that  we  can  reduce  it  to  its  higher  law. 

This,  in  sonic  degree,  is  the  business  of  the  coming  sections. 
We  may  see  then,  I  hope,  how  truly  this  is  the  law  of  a  higher 
evolutionary  stage,  mysterious  and  inexplicable  until  we  stand 
where  we  can  see  it  from  above. 

I.      THE     SECOND     BIRTH 

The  spiritual  life,  like  all  life,  begins  with  birth.  That  is 
its  law.  It  is  not  a  thing  put  on,  like  a  policy,  and  therefore 
with  a  policy's  trend  of  supple  opportunism;  nor  a  thing  la- 
boriously ciphered  out,  like  a  philosophy,  and  therefore  de- 
pendent on  depth  of  thought;  not  a  thing  submitted  to  like  an 
allotment,  as  is  law;  nor  on  the  other  hand  achieved  by  re- 
bellion, as  is  an  uprise  of  anarchy.  It  is  born  in  a  man,  taking 
into  itself  therefore  all  the  native  currents  of  his  being,  and  as 
solid  and  calculable  as  is  his  personality  itself.  This  is  the 
mystery  of  it,  that  it  may  supervene  some  time  along  in  life, 
when  as  it  would  seem  the  bent  is  already  determined,  and  yet 
have  a  wholly  new  bent  and  direction  of  its  own,  which  at  once 
transforms  and  regulates  the  old,  keeping  every  good  thing 
intact.  We  have  the  description  of  this  second  birth  from  the 
Man  who  of  all  men  was  most  competent  to  define  it;  from 
our  Lord  Himself,  who,  regarding  the  fulness  of  life  that  was 


ii6  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

in  Him,  best  knew  how  He  came  by  it,  and  what  it  was  like. 
In  the  name  of  all  the  spiritually  born  He  said,  "We  speak 
that  we  do  know,  and  testify  that  we  have  seen;"  and  we  can- 
not go  back  of  His  account,  to  verify  or  gainsay,  until  we  are 
like  Him,  seeing  with  His  eyes.  "He  that  is  spiritual,"  as 
St.  Paul  says,  "judgeth  all  things,  yet  he  himself  is  judged  of 
no  man." 

Our  Lord's  remarks  on  the  second  birth  occur,  you  re- 
member, in  his  conversation  with  Nicodemus,  one  of  the  most 
cherished  and  quoted  passages  in  the  whole  Bible.  Nicode- 
mus, a  man  high  in  Jewish  counsels,  and  so  a  typical  repre- 
sentative of  the  time-honored  consciousness  of  life,  had  come 
by  night  to  Jesus  because  he,  a  teacher  in  Israel,  intuitively 
recognized  in  the  younger  man  a  teacher  sent  from  God.  It 
was,  though  not  without  its  tremors  of  caution,  the  drawing 
of  a  sincere  and  truth-seeking  heart.  You  remember  how 
inexplicable  the  first  onset  of  the  new  idea  was  to  him.  "How 
can  these  things  be?"  To  the  Jewish  mind,  moulded  in  its 
consciousness  of  all-encompassing  law  and  prescription, 
nothing  could  have  seemed  more  calculated  to  dissolve  the 
whole  order  of  things  and  launch  the  spirit  of  man  on  a  shore- 
less ocean  of  unrestraint.  Apparently  to  make  the  shock  as 
great  as  possible,  our  Lord  springs  the  new  idea  upon  him 
without  preface  or  preparation,  as  if,  like  the  new  birth  itself, 
He  would  impose  the  very  thought  of  it  upon  mankind  as  a 
kind  of  crisis  and  astonishment.  Men  must  be  startled,  as  it 
were,  out  of  the  old  way  into  the  new;  as  must  needs  be,  per- 
haps, because  of  the  sudden  and  complete  reversal  of  the  cur- 
rents of  being.  Yet  it  is  all  so  orderly  and  viable  too;  no  labor 
and  logic  about  it;  a  moment,  and  the  change  is  made.  The 
spirit  awakes,  the  will  springs  responsive,  and  lo,  it  is  free. 
It  is  like  that  cripple  at  Bethesda  who  for  thirty-eight  years 
had  been  lying  passive,  waiting  for  some  one  to  save  him  all 
volition  and  initiative  and  just  souse  him  in  the  pool.  "Wilt 
thou  be  made  whole?"  was  the  question  that  came  ringing  to 
his  startled  ears  one  day;  but  even  then,  not  seeing  the  point 
of  the  inquiry,  he  began  to  whine  because  some  one  else  al- 


THE  LAW  OF   THE   SPIRIT  OF  LIFE       117 

ways  got  in  ahead  of  him.  "Rise,  take  up  thy  bed,  and  walk," 
was  the  only  answer  to  his  complaint;  and  almost  before  he 
knew  it  he  was  stepping  forth  out  of  his  hospital,  a  sound, 
whole  man.  Where  did  the  onset  of  health  begin,  and  was  it 
natural  or  spiritual?  Just  so  our  strange  fact  comes  to  us. 
The  second  birth  is  the  last  term  of  a  long  embryonic  process, 
and  all  the  power  and  growth  of  the  process  is  in  it;  but,  like 
its  fleshly  analogue,  it  is  the  sudden  opening  of  doors  from  a 
womb  to  a  world.  It  was  of  such  a  described  event  as  this  that 
Nicodemus,  still  environed  by  the  womb  of  the  old  dispensa- 
tion, still  in  the  unbreathing  dark,  asked  in  utter  bewilderment, 
"How  can  these  things  be?" 

Before  we  raise  Nicodemus'  question  for  ourselves,  which 
we  must  needs  do,  and  especially  in  its  evolutionary  light,  let  us 
look  a  little  more  closely  at  our  Lord's  presentation  of  the 
matter.  His  abrupt  beginning  relates  to  a  subject  which,  when 
He  spoke,  was  evidently  in  the  air  —  the  Kingdom  of  God. 
That  phrase  puts  into  words  a  great  presentiment  that  just 
then  was  stirring  obscurely  in  men's  minds:  the  presentiment 
that  somehow  the  fulness  of  the  time  was  close  upon  them, 
and  that  a  new  order  of  things  was  ripe  and  ready.  Pharisee 
and  fisherman  alike,  minds  set  in  the  legal  order  and  minds 
tending  to  the  spiritual  alike,  now  felt  the  strange  electric 
thrill,  and  were  inquiring  what  it  might  mean.  It  was  not  for 
nothing,  nor  for  a  small  thing,  like  a  mere  change  of  dynasty 
or  release  from  Roman  rule,  that  the  surging  spirit  of  man, 
whose  wings  had  so  long  beaten,  bird-like,  against  the  bars  of 
its  earthly  cage,  now  began  to  feel  that  the  bolts  were  slip- 
ping back  in  the  doors  of  a  larger  future. 

The  old  order  change th,  yielding  place  to  new, 

And  God  fulfils  Himself  in  many  ways, 

Lest  one  good  custom  should  corrupt  the  world. 

When  therefore  without  preface  our  Lord  used  the  expression 
"the  kingdom  of  God,"  He  was  as  truly  speaking  in  Nicodemus' 
idiom  as  if  He  had  spoken  casually  of  the  weather.  The  king- 
dom of  God,  otherwise  called  the  kingdom  of  Heaven  —  what 


ii8  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

is  that?  Evidently  some  new  organized  government  wherein, 
as  so  long  promised  and  prophesied,  the  will  of  God  was  to  be 
the  ultimate  law,  and  wherein  Heaven  was  to  be  the  atmos- 
phere and  environment  of  manhood  life.  What  then  was  it  - 
a  thing  coming  to  man,  all  made,  and  he  needing  only  to  be 
taken  up  supinely  and  soused  into  it,  like  the  man  at 
the  Bethesda  pool,  or  a  thing  to  which  man  was  to  come,  in  the 
might  of  his  long-ripening  spirit,  and  enter  on  it  like  a  prince 
taking  possession  of  his  inheritance,  or  like  a  youth  assuming 
his  majority?  Our  Lord's  words,  startling  as  they  are,  har- 
monize accurately  with  the  long-promised  transition  from  ser- 
vitude to  sonship.  Only,  they  conform  to  the  true  evolutionary 
order  by  making  this  not  an  affair  of  political  counsel  and 
legislation  but  a  new  birth,  a  second  birth.  " Verily,  verily,  I 
say  unto  thee,  Except  a  man  be  born  again"  -  avcoOev, 
again,  or  from  above,  or  both?  —  "he  cannot  see  the  kingdom 
of  God";  cannot  so  much  as  see  it,  let  alone  enter  it,  though 
it  stand  as  plain  as  the  Bunker  Hill  monument  right  before 
his  eyes.  You  see  how  our  ever-present  question  of  light,  of 
having  eyes  to  see  and  use  the  light,  comes  into  the  case.  Be 
born  with  eyes,  above  the  brute's  and  worldling's  eyes,  and 
then  you  can  see.  And  when  Nicodemus'  question  tries  to 
befog  the  matter,  "How  can  a  man  be  born  when  he  is  old?" 
our  Lord's  further  assertion  assumes  the  more  illuminate 
idiom,  assuring  him  that  man  must  be  born  not  of  blood,  nor 
of  the  will  of  the  flesh,  nor  of  the  will  of  man,  but  of  God: 
"Verily,  verily,  I  say  unto  thee,  Except  a  man  be  born  of  water 
and  of  the  Spirit,  he  cannot  enter  into  the  kingdom  of  God." 
Born  of  water  —  what  is  that?  Water  is  the  natural  symbol 
of  purity,  of  cleanness;  and  is  not  cleanness  from  sin  and  the 
soilure  of  earth  the  thing  after  which  law  has  struggled  so 
long,  and  struggled  in  vain?  You  cannot  legislate  cleanness, 
cannot  get  it  by  volumes  and  libraries  and  worlds  full  of  rules 
and  codes.  You  must  be  born  of  a  cosmos  of  purity,  that 
purity  of  heart  wherein  a  man  sees  God;  must  be  saturated 
and  enveloped  with  that  bath  of  cleanness  which  comes  only 
by  way  of  the  inner  nature;  and  the  rest  follows,  by  vital  con- 


THE  LAW  OF  THE  SPIRIT  OF  LIFE       119 

sequence.  "He  that  is  bathed,"  as  our  Lord  says  later, 
"needeth  not  save  to  wash  his  feet,  but  is  clean  every  whit"; 
the  disposal  of  the  daily  soilure,  as  he  goes  about  his  worldly 
ways,  is  an  easily  adjusted  matter  then.  Born  of  the  Spirit  — 
what  is  that?  What  Spirit?  for  our  Lord  adds  no  qualifying 
or  limiting  adjective,  not  even  a  definite  article;  it  is  "born 
of  water  and  spirit,"  as  if  there  were  but  one  element,  whether 
in  man  or  in  the  world  or  in  heaven,  that  could  be  so  called. 
No  dissociation  of  elements  here,  such  as  we  inveterately 
make;  as  if  there  were  two  things  to  reconcile:  an  evil  spirit 
in  man,  and  a  Holy  Spirit  outside  of  him,  always  more  or  less 
at  cross  purposes.  Whatever  truth  there  is  in  this  idea  will 
come  out  afterward;  here  it  is  ignored;  here  too  the  idea,  like 
that  of  water,  seems  to  be  both  literal  and  figurative,  for  the 
word  for  spirit,  irvevpa  is  taken  from  nature,  meaning 
literally  wind,  so  that  in  the  sense  vocabulary  He  is  saying, 
"born  of  water  and  wind."  But  we  can  no  more  let  it  stay 
literal  than  we  can  the  idea  of  water.  And  just  as  the  phrase 
"born  of  water,"  of  cleanness,  solves  the  ideal  of  the  old  order, 
so  the  phrase  "born  of  wind,"  of  spirit,  opens  and  makes  viable 
the  ideal  of  the  new  order.  It  names  the  one  means  of  en- 
trance into  the  deepest  world  order;  the  cosmos,  the  universe, 
of  spiritual  powers  and  values,  which  are  beneath  and  behind 
and  within  all  that  is.  "God  is  spirit,"  the  same  Teacher  says 
later;  just  as  He  says  God  is  light,  God  is  love;  "and  they 
that  worship  Him"  —  they  that  feel  and  acknowledge  His  su- 
premacy, His  worth-ship  —  "must  worship  Him  in  spirit  and 
in  truth."  Be  born  into  the  boundless  element  of  spirit,  and 
forthwith  you  find  that  your  bondage  to  the  lower  world  is 
gone;  for  you  become  aware  that  out  there  in  the  abyss  of 
light  and  mystery  "the  Spirit  itself  beareth  witness  with  our 
spirit,  that  we  are  the  children  of  God."  We  have  spoken  of 
the  spirit  of  man  and  its  dim  crude  reactions  on  the  sum  of 
things;  here  it  has  become  consciously  identified  with  the 
spirit  of  the  universe,  so  that  one  will,  one  freedom,  animates 
them  both.  Being  born  into  the  spiritual  family,  we  thence- 
forth live  spontaneously  as  to  the  manner  born,  have  the  large 


120  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

family  interests  at  heart,  being  thenceforth  workers  together 
with  God.  A  simple  elementary  matter  this,  as  our  Lord  makes 
it  out;  He  even  intimates  that  in  speaking  of  it  He  is  speaking 
of  earthly  things.  "If  I  have  told  you  earthly  things,"  He 
says,  "and  ye  believe  not,  how  shall  ye  believe  if  I  tell  you 
of  heavenly  things?  That  which  is  born  of  the  flesh  is  flesh; 
and  that  which  is  born  of  the  Spirit  is  spirit."  That  ought  to 
be  obvious  to  anyone,  even  to  a  legalized  master  of  Israel;  it 
belongs  to  the  very  A  B  C  of  things;  "Marvel  not  that  I  said 
unto  thee,  Ye  must  be  born  again."  The  fact,  from  His  point 
of  view,  stationed  as  He  is  on  the  upper  and  illuminate  side, 
is  self -evidencing. 

Then  He  goes  on  to  explain,  to  this  man  whose  ideals  are 
still  groping  along  the  under  side,  what  a  man  spiritually  born 
is  like,  how  we  can  tell  that  a  new  life  is  pulsating  in  him, 
whether  we  understand  it  or  not.  For  this  purpose  He  goes 
back  to  the  natural  phenomena  of  the  wind,  which  He  is  dis- 
engaging from  their  merely  physical  motions  and  pressing  into 
His  new  sphere  of  spiritual  fact.  This  is  what  we  must  needs 
do;  our  thoughts  ascend  to  spirit  from  sense,  to  the  unseen 
from  the  realm  of  the  seen.  And  I  want  you  to  note  carefully 
what  characteristics  of  the  wind  He  uses.  "The  wind  bloweth 
where  it  listeth"  —  that  is,  it  is  the  one  natural  symbol  of 
perfect,  self-directive,  self-poised  freedom;  "and  thou  hearest 
the  sound  thereof"  —  that  is,  you  know  it  is  there  and  is  real, 
by  its  actual  palpable  effects;  "but  canst  not  tell  whence  it 
cometh,  and  whither  it  goeth"  —  that  is,  the  source  and  goal 
of  it,  as  you  stand  outside  of  it,  hearing  it,  swayed  by  it  in 
a  way,  are  as  absolutely  inexplicable  to  you  as  if  it  were  a  thing 
of  another  world.  There  is  one  of  the  commonest  phenomena 
of  nature  that  you  really  know  nothing  about,  any  more  than 
you  know  about  the  real  inwardness  of  electricity,  or  mag- 
netism, or  light.  It  is  there,  and  it  has  its  world,  and  you  can 
to  a  degree  utilize  its  effects;  but  so  far  as  you  are  concerned, 
its  will  is  its  own,  not  yours  at  all.  Well,  says  Jesus,  this  is  the 
character  of  the  spiritual  life;  "so  is  every  one  that  is  born 
of  the  Spirit."  I  think  our  commentators  have  done  their  best 


THE  LAW  OF   THE   SPIRIT  OF  LIFE       121 

to  befog  this  latter  assertion.  They  say  it  means,  so  it  is  with 
every  one  that  is  born  of  the  Spirit;  that  is,  that  the  Spirit,  so 
to  say,  takes  him  up  and  whirls  him  through  the  air,  willy-nilly, 
and  he  has  no  idea  what  it  all  means,  where  his  new  life  is  from 
or  whither  bound,  but  is  just  swept  along  on  an  inexplicable 
current  of  being.  This  explanation,  as  you  see,  takes  away  all 
his  free-will,  all  his  initiative,  all  his  self-directive  light  of  life, 
and  leaves  him  a  more  helpless  automaton  than  ever.  In  other 
words,  it  makes  the  divine  spirit  everything,  the  human  spirit 
nothing;  and  so  the  dissociation  of  divine  and  human  is  re- 
duced by  practically  annihilating,  or  absorbing,  the  human. 
And  this  in  the  face  of  the  plainest  assertion,  that  the  spiritu- 
ally born  himself,  not  his  environment,  is  in  all  these  charac- 
teristics like  the  wind.  Nay,  the  assertion  is  further 
reenforced.  "Thou  canst  not  tell  the  whence  and  the  whither," 
says  our  Lord,  and  He  is  speaking  to  a  bemuddled  Jew.  Does 
He  mean,  nobody  can  tell?  Why,  almost  immediately  He 
says,  "We  speak  that  we  do  know,  and  testify  that  we  have 
seen."  Who  are  "we"?  Is  He  not  speaking  in  the  name  of 
all  who  are  born  of  the  Spirit?  Who  else  can  the  "we"  be? 
He  identifies  Himself  with  those  who  have  been  born  again; 
uses  their  emancipated  consciousness,  gives  for  all  time  their 
marvelous  testimony  to  their  sense  of  new  life.  "He  that  is 
spiritual  judge th  all  things,  yet  he  himself  is  judged  of  no  man. 
For  who  hath  known  the  mind  of  the  Lord,  that  he  may  in- 
struct him?  But  we  have  the  mind  of  Christ."  And  here  is 
the  mind  of  Christ,  making  the  pioneer  revelation  of  the  new 
life  to  which  the  adult  manhood  is  born. 

"Thou  canst  not  tell;  we  speak  that  we  do  know."  How 
far  this  transition  of  spiritual  birth  has  brought  us,  and  how 
truly  it  is  an  access  of  light  as  well  as  of  life,  we  can  realize  by 
comparing  with  our  Lord's  assertion  the  already  quoted  words 
of  Koheleth  written  in  the  midst  of  the  twilight  period. 
"Everything,"  the  sage  says,  "hath  He  made  beautiful  in  its 
time;  also  He  hath  put  eternity  in  their  heart;  — yet  not  so 
that  man  findeth  out  the  work  which  God  hath  wrought,  from 
the  beginning,  and  to  the  end."  He  is  speaking  in  the  cosmic 


122  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

consciousness,  and  voicing  the  cosmic  dimness  of  vision.  In 
this  stratum  of  things  his  words  remain  as  true  now  as  ever. 
But  all  the  while,  being  spiritually  sensitive,  he  is  aware  of 
an  unresolved  element  which  his  cosmic  standard  cannot  meas- 
ure; as  inexplicable  to  that  level  of  being  as  was  the  wind  to 
Nicodemus,  yet  also  just  as  real  in  its  effects;  the  element, 
namely,  of  eternity,  in  the  heart,  bearing  us  on  from  an  un- 
known spring  to  an  unknown  ocean  of  being.  The  vision  is 
becoming  clearer  now,  not  too  dim  now  but  too  glorious  for 
our  eyes  to  see;  for  it  makes  all  the  difference,  the  conscious- 
ness that  we  are  born  of  the  ultimate  world  order,  and  can 
feel  and  know  the  life  of  that  Spirit  whose  first  word  was  "Let 
there  be  light,"  and  can  look  forward  in  congenial  spirit  to  the 
far-withdrawn  summit  where  dwelleth  He  "who  only  hath  im- 
mortality, dwelling  in  the  .light  which  no  man  can  approach 
unto."  The  feeling  of  such  whence  and  whither  we  can  store 
joyously  in  our  growing  manhood,  when  we  know  that  the  full 
realization  is  precluded  only  by  our  own  finiteness. 

We  are  ready  now,  in  the  idiom  of  our  evolutionary  ideal, 
to  raise  Nicodemus7  question  anew,  "How  can  these  things  be?" 
to  inquire  whether  this  second  birth  is  to  be  referred  to  an  un- 
motived  irruption  and  miracle  from  without,  or  whether  it 
comes  through  the  development  and  illumination  of  forces  al- 
ready stored  in  the  deep  heart  of  manhood.  But  first,  taking 
the  scripture  idea  on  its  own  ground,  we  must  heed  our  Lord's 
word  that  this  thing  can  be  seen  only  from  the  upper  and  spir- 
itual side.  Perhaps  that  is  another  way  of  saying  that  in  order 
to  know  the  spiritual  life  one  must  live  it;  then  he  has  all  his 
subject  of  study  within  himself,  his  heart,  with  all  that  com- 
munion and  interchange  of  life  values  which  he  shares  con- 
sciously with  the  living  source.  At  any  rate,  it  is  from  this 
upper  side,  however  wonderful,  that  we  have  the  warrant  for 
approaching  it.  We  will  bear  in  mind  what  has  been  said,  that 
we  are  working  in  the  stratum  of  life  where  evolution  has  be- 
come personal  and  conscious  of  itself;  where  therefore  the 
spirit  of  man  is  learning  to  cooperate  wisely  with  a  Spirit  like 
his  own,  but  boundless  and  universal,  learning  to  embody  on 


THE  LAW  OF   THE   SPIRIT  OF  LIFE       123 

his  own  scale  and  in  his  limits  the  Will  which  determines  all, 
recognized  and  worshipped  as 

A  motion  and  a  spirit  that  impels 

All  thinking  things,  all  objects  of  all  thought, 

And   rolls   through   all   things. 

In  other  words,  his  growing  insight  has  come  to  recognize  the 
source  and  first  impact  of  evolution  not  as  mechanical,  blind, 
as  it  were  fortuitous,  but  as  wise,  intelligent,  and  closing  in 
itself  attributes  not  less  high  than  the  highest  that  man  finds  in 
his  own  potencies  and  ideals.  If  evolution  must  be  matched 
with  involution,  and  man  is  a  product  of  it,  then  surely  the 
source  and  initiative,  with  the  tremendous  potencies  lying  cap- 
sulate  within  it,  must  be  as  great  not  only  as  its  highest 
product  man  is,  but  as  he  can  ever  hope  to  be.  The  glory  of 
the  beginning  can  be  estimated  only  by  the  glory  of  the  end, 
where  the  finished  structure  crowns  the  whole  work.  The  unit 
of  measure  is  not  the  atom  but  the  God.  And  as  we  see  man 
plodding  along  the  way,  sloughing  off  his  weakness,  his  igno- 
rance, his  imperfections,  and  growing  in  Godlikeness,  just  ac- 
cording as  his  spirit  sees  and  responds  to  the  unseen,  who  shall 
set  the  limit? 

The  great  quarrel,  as  you  know,  which  has  hitherto  raged 
between  science  and  theology,  has  centred  round  the  question 
whether  our  universe  is  a  product  of  evolution  or  of  special 
creation;  whether  its  complex  organism  has  risen  through  the 
steady  development  of  things  in  obedience  to  laws  and  energies 
stored  within,  or  through  miraculous  interference  here  and 
there  from  without,  injecting  as  it  were  a  new  and  unpromised 
energy  and  setting  law  at  defiance.  It  is  a  dispute  about  the 
manner  in  which  things  have  been  brought  about;  for  the 
wonder  of  the  things  themselves  is  before  our  eyes,  an  amazing 
pageant  of  glory,  as  great  as  if  nothing  but  miracle  were  con- 
cerned in  them.  The  question  comes  up  with  special  insistence 
here,  because  in  all  our  series  of  wonders  this  so-called  second 
birth  is  the  thing  that  looks  most  like  a  special  creation,  most 
as  if  the  shaping  hand  of  God  Himself  were  laid  bare.  If  we 


124  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

can  understand  this,  then,  having  the  clue  to  the  hardest  and 
highest  phenomenon,  we  have  the  key  to  the  whole  series. 

May  it  not  turn  out  that  the  whole  dispute  is  the  old  one 
of  the  two  sides  of  the  shield?  If  this  second  birth  were  proved 
to  be  a  special  creation,  would  it  necessarily  disprove  the  other 
alternative?  Or  is  there  any  alternative  at  all?  It  may  merely 
prove  that  at  every  step  of  evolution  there  are  just  as  many 
unseen  forces  as  seen,  a  whole  world  full  of  both,  each  coming 
from  its  own  sphere  upper  or  under,  and  all  working  together 
to  one  large  result;  which  result  here  at  this  second  birth  has 
reached  the  point  where  it  so  declares  itself,  so  takes  into 
partnership  the  spirit  of  man  and  the  spirit  of  God,  that  for 
the  first  time  we  can  begin  to  see  things  as  they  are.  It  is 
the  coming  of  life  to  light,  so  that  we  become  aware  of  the 
real  law  of  the  spirit  of  life.  Here  then  is  the  unit  of  evolution. 
This  is  the  view  I  am  disposed  to  take  of  it.  If  evolution  be- 
gan with  personal  spiritual  energy,  then,  it  would  seem,  there 
must  come  a  point  in  the  series  where  person  shall  be  revealed 
to  person,  where  spirit  shall  spring  to  meet  spirit;  and  so  the 
creation,  being  endowed  with  a  mind  of  its  own,  may  become 
intelligently  aware  not  only  of  its  Creator  but  of  the  real  in- 
wardness of  its  own  nature  and  of  its  trend  through  the 
eternities.  And  it  is  in  the  second  birth,  if  anywhere,  that  this 
light  of  life  bursts  forth. 

On  this  line  —  on  the  line  laid  down  by  our  Lord's  definition 
—  let  us  try  to  trace  it  a  little  way. 

Let  us  begin  with  the  most  estranging  feature,  the  fact  that 
to  men  of  the  Nicodemus  type,  whose  spirit  is  set  in  the  lower 
legalistic  key,  the  birth  into  a  new  world  of  free  spirit  is  ab- 
solutely inconceivable;  they  can  no  more  realize  it  than  we 
can  hear  the  music  of  the  spheres,  which  was  fabled  to  be  so 
far  above  our  gamut  of  sound  that  our  ears  could  not  take  it 
in;  or  than  we  can  see  the  ultra-violet  rays  of  the  spectrum, 
which  yet  are  there,  working  their  finer  effect,  in  a  light  un- 
approachable to  our  sense.  And  indeed  these  casual  illustra- 
tions launch  us  into  the  heart  of  our  subject.  They  remind 
us  that  in  many  spheres,  perhaps  in  every  sphere  of  life  and 


THE  LAW  OF  THE  SPIRIT  OF  LIFE       125 

thought,  we  are  midway  in  a  scale  and  gamut  of  things  which 
in  both  directions  extends  infinitely  beyond  us;  and  our  Lord's 
assertion  is  but  His  way  of  saying  that  the  second  birth  intro- 
duces us  to  a  sphere  of  life-values  beyond  sense,  beyond  even 
logic  and  reasoning.  St.  Paul  says  virtually  the  same  thing, 
in  his  assertion  that  "Eye  hath  not  seen,  nor  ear  heard,  neither 
have  entered  into  the  heart  of  man  the  things  which  God  hath 
prepared  for  them  that  love  him;  but  God  hath  revealed  them 
unto  us  by  his  Spirit:  for  the  Spirit  searcheth  all  things,  yea 
the  deep  things  of  God";  and  even  this  assertion,  as  he  says, 
is  already  written  in  phophecy,  in  Isaiah's  words:  "For  since 
the  beginning  of  the  world  men  have  not  heard,  nor  perceived 
by  the  ear,  neither  hath  the  eye  seen,  O  God,  beside  thee,  what 
he  hath  prepared  for  him  that  waiteth  for  him."  Here  is  the 
waiting  for  it  on  the  one  side,  in  prophetic  dimness,  and  the 
record  of  actual  fulfilment  on  the  other.  Manhood  has  risen 
in  the  scale,  beyond  the  point  that  was  such  a  barrier  to  Nico- 
demus.  But  must  we  desert  our  evolutionary  analogy  here, 
and  betake  ourselves  to  miracle,  to  a  special  and  unmotived 
creation?  Scientists  have  long  been  trying  to  make  out  that 
in  that  vast  scale  of  life  which  sweeps  from  the  protoplasmic 
cell  upward  there  is  an  equable  and  uniform  progress,  that 
somehow,  if  we  could  but  find  it,  height  melts  into  height,  and 
species  into  species,  with  all  the  connecting  links  somehow 
traceable  and  calculable ;  and  they  have  been  impatient  of  any 
other  conception  of  things.  But  you  know  too  how  recently 
Professor  De  Vries  has  brought  that  notion  into  doubt,  by 
showing  that  nature  advances  not  in  that  equable  way  but  by 
sudden  leaps  and  metamorphoses,  which  he  calls  mutations; 
so  that  many  a  time  suddenly,  and  by  some  inexplicable 
agency,  a  new  species  appears;  and  he  says  the  scientific 
"battle  now  rages  about  the  question  whether  these  strange 
mutations  are  to  be  regarded  as  the  principal  means  of  evolu- 
tion, or  whether  slow  and  gradual  changes  have  not  also  played 
a  large  and  important  part."  You  will  recall  too  what  I  quoted 
from  Professor  Shaler:  his  remark  about  a  certain  instance  he 
gave  which  he  said  was  "one  of  many,  very  many,  instances  in 


126  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

which  we  find  the  apparently  uniform  processes  of  Nature, 
those  which  are  indeed  uniform  in  their  steps  of  action,  leading 
to  sudden  and  complete  changes  of  result."  Why,  even  mathe- 
matics has  ciphered  out  the  abstract  possibility  of  all  this,  in 
its  theory  of  the  fourth  dimension.  Suppose,  it  says,  a  being 
whose  whole  life  of  sense  and  action  moved  in  a  world  of  only 
two  dimensions,  length  and  breadth.  All  you  have  to  do  is 
to  lift  that  being  up,  adding  the  third  dimension  of  height,  and 
at  once  it  can  look  down  upon  its  former  world,  and  look  in- 
side of  its  own  nature,  as  it  never  could  before.  The  third 
dimension,  simple  as  it  was,  had  been  absolutely  inconceivable 
to  it,  until  it  was  actually  transferred  thereto.  Now,  says 
mathematics,  there  is  no  abstract  reason  why  we  should  not 
go  on  adding  new  dimensions  to  the  three  we  already  know,  and 
as  a  consequence  be  able  to  see  inward,  penetrate  within  our 
world  and  nature,  as  we  cannot  begin  to  conceive  now;  and 
yet,  as  Nicodemus  says,  "How  can  these  things  be?" 

Now  this  second  birth,  as  our  Lord  describes  it  and  as  St. 
Paul  gives  its  consequences,  has  all  the  marks  of  one  of  those 
sudden  mutations  in  great  Nature  which  are  perfectly  obvious 
as  seen  from  the  upper  side,  but  from  the  under  side  are  as 
inconceivable  as  is  the  organic  world  to  the  inorganic,  as  is  the 
animal  to  the  plant,  as  is  the  human  to  the  animal.  In  fact, 
this  is  the  supreme  mutation;  the  nodal  point  in  manhood  de- 
velopment where  all  at  once  the  landscape  of  life  becomes  il- 
luminate, and  that  fulness  of  life,  that  redemption  of  the  body 
for  which  the  whole  creation  has  groaned  and  travailed  in  pain 
together  until  now,  comes  into  the  field  of  vision.  Passing 
wonderful  it  is,  I  grant  you;  the  glory  of  it  dazzles  us  as  much 
as  it  did  Nicodemus;  but  it  is  not  my  speculation,  it  is  the 
absolute  assertion  and  tissue  of  the  Bible  idea,  and  it  has  all 
the  consistency  of  the  highest  evolutionary  science. 

The  supreme  mutation,  I  have  just  said,  is  this  marvelous 
birth  into  the  sphere  of  spirit;  the  highest  change  that  our 
earthly  vision  can  see ;  yet  put  before  us  as  so  much  a  matter  of 
course  that  our  Lord  says  of  it,  "Marvel  not  that  I  said  unto 
thee,  Ye  must  be  born  again."  And  indeed  our  foregoing 


THE  LAW  OF   THE   SPIRIT  OF  LIFE       127 

studies  have  shown  us  the  elements  that  have  led  up  to  it;  have 
revealed  that  it  is  not  an  unmotived  miracle  but  that,  as  Pro- 
fessor De  Vries  puts  it,  slow  and  gradual  changes  have  also 
played  a  large  and  important  part.  And  now,  as  to  the  mo- 
ment of  transition  from  the  long  gestation  of  the  ages  to  the 
sudden  new  life,  or  as  we  may  now  call  it  the  shock  of  manhood 
mutation,  you  have  noted  that  the  first  element  our  Lord  gives 
of  it  is,  the  sense  and  atmosphere  of  absolute  freedom:  "the 
wind  bloweth  where  it  listeth,  .  .  .  so  is  every  one  that  is 
born  of  wind,  of  spirit."  It  is,  as  it  were,  a  sudden  opening  of 
doors  into  a  larger  place,  the  sudden  coming  into  breath,  and 
light,  and  song,  and  joy.  Have  you  ever  noticed  how  our  Lord 
described  what  He  was  on  earth  for,  and  how  much  He  made 
of  this  element  of  disimprisonment?  "The  Spirit  of  the  Lord 
is  upon  me,"  He  said  in  the  synagogue  of  Nazareth,  "because 
He  hath  anointed  me  to  preach  .  .  .  deliverance  to  the  cap- 
tives, and  recovering  of  sight  to  the  blind,  to  set  at  liberty 
them  that  are  bruised,  to  preach  the  acceptable  year  of  the 
Lord."  He  was  reading  this,  quoting  it  from  the  Scripture  al- 
ready in  their  hands;  already  the  ideal  had  been  sown  by 
prophecy  into  the  heart  of  manhood;  "he  hath  anointed  me," 
Isaiah  had  said,  "to  proclaim  liberty  to  the  captives,  and  the 
opening  of  the  prison  to  them  that  are  bound."  You  re- 
member, too,  how  later,  when  our  Lord  in  his  parable  of  judg- 
ment gave  the  principles  on  which  men  should  be  eternally 
blessed  of  the  Father;  among  these  was  "I  —  that  is,  every 
least  one  of  these  my  brethren  —  was  in  prison,  and  ye  came 
unto  me."  Nay,  his  apostles  would  not  let  this  element  of  His 
ministry  cease  even  with  His  death,  but  imaged  Him  as  still 
preaching  to  the  spirits  in  prison,  who  in  the  old  Noachic  days 
had  perished  without  law  in  the  blind  excess  of  animalism. 
What  a  vast  jail-delivery,  when  we  come  to  think  of  it,  the 
scripture  ideal  rolls  up  around  this  mutation,  this  nodal  transi- 
tion of  manhood  growth !  How  this  second  birth  seems  to  open 
the  boundless  realm  of  being  and  doing  exactly  what  we  will, 
going  and  coming,  working  and  rejoicing,  as  the  emancipate 
spirit  dictates!  It  is  even  so,  as  St.  Paul  says:  "The  law  of 


128  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

the  spirit  of  life  hath  made  me  free  from  the  law  of  sin  and 
death."  We  have  not  received  the  spirit  of  bondage,  again 
to  fear,  but  the  spirit  of  adoption,  whereby  we  cry,  Abba, 
Father.  When  the  spirit  of  man  recognizes  the  Father  of 
spirits,  and  springs  filially  to  meet  the  source  of  its  evolutionary 
life,  then  farewell  forever  to  the  old  alien  pressure  of  law,  to 
the  old  groaning  and  passiveness  under  a  burden  of  fate  and 
death;  the  law  of  our  being  is  henceforth  ours  to  use,  not  to 
be  used  and  enslaved  by.  "For  God  hath  not  given  us  the 
spirit  of  fear,"  writes  St.  Paul  to  Timothy,  "but  of  power,  and 
of  love,  and  of  a  sound  mind."  Is  not  this,  in  compendium, 
the  birth  of  a  completed  manhood,  wherein  will  and  affection 
and  intellect,  the  whole  inner  man,  stands  forth  master  of  his 
world  and  his  fate? 

But  here  perhaps  the  question  rises,  Why  a  second  birth? 
Why,  instead  of  coinciding  with  our  first  birth  into  the  world, 
and  so  an  experience  in  which  apart  from  our  volition  we  find 
ourselves  all  transported  and  naturalized,  it  has  to  be  brought 
about  with  such  travail-pangs  of  creation,  and  after  so  long 
gestation  in  the  underworld  of  being?  Well,  as  soon  as  it  is 
propounded,  with  its  elements  in  order  before  us,  the  question 
answers  itself.  The  birth  is  a  second  birth  because  it  belongs 
to  the  manhood  stratum  wherein  our  evolution  has  become 
self-conscious  and  personal,  and  we  cooperate  freely  with  it, 
to  do  our  eager  share  in  bringing  its  consummation.  How 
could  this  be  with  our  animal  birth?  That  was  a  thing  beyond 
our  will,  beyond  our  choice,  beyond  our  knowledge.  We  did 
not  ask  to  be  brought  here.  It  came  about,  as  it  were,  in  the 
reflex  and  automatic  order  of  things,  in  the  order  that  Pro- 
fessor Cope  tries  to  explain  with  his  theories  of  archaestheti- 
cism  and  katagenesis;  a  birth,  like  all  animal  birth,  into  the 
species  and  the  race  and  the  material  environment.  But  this 
second  birth  must  needs  supervene  at  a  point  higher  up,  where 
two  elements  can  work  together,  the  element  of  an  appealing 
and  vitalizing  spirit  from  the  unseen,  and  the  element  of  glad 
free  human  choice,  the  spirit  of  manhood,  rising  to  meet  it. 
Being  of  the  spirit,  it  is  the  birth  into  freedom;  it  is  the  soul 


THE  LAW  OF  THE   SPIRIT  OF  LIFE       129 

emerging  from  its  prison  into  the  open  air  of  liberty  and  light 
and  love.  Why,  it  must  be  so:  this  birth,  from  the  very  na- 
ture of  the  case,  must  be  a  birth  wherein  the  spirit  is  awake, 
and  knows  what  it  does,  and  makes  for  itself  individual  choice 
of  its  life  and  destiny.  This  is  the  essential  characteristic 
that  makes  it  so  truly  not  a  mere  natural  and  as  it  were  animal 
growth  but  a  marvelous  mutation  which  seems  to  open  a  com- 
plete reversal  of  life  conditions. 

And  here  we  see,  in  another  light,  its  real  evolutionary  sig- 
nificance. What  we  are  contemplating,  in  the  large,  is  that 
momentous  point  of  history  and  growth,  the  emergence  of  the 
full-orbed,  full-functioned  individual.  To  this,  after  all,  our 
period  of  gestation,  our  twilight  period,  has  all  the  while  been 
leading.  It  is  the  great  culminating  point  in  earthly  evolution. 
You  recall  Professor  Shaler's  words:  "It  is  hardly  too  much 
to  say  that  on  this  individualizing  process  depends  all  the  real 
work  that  is  done  within  the  universe."  We  can  realize  this 
now,  both  in  the  history  we  have  traced  and  in  our  own  per- 
sonality. We  have  seen  the  spirit  of  man  reacting  on  the  law 
of  the  species;  gradually  enlarging  it  from  the  unit  organism  to 
the  family,  from  the  family  to  the  clan,  from  the  clan  to  the 
tribe,  from  the  tribe  to  the  nation,  from  the  nation  to  the  race. 
We  have  seen  how  the  Jew,  to  whom  was  entrusted  the  care 
of  this  spiritual  expansion,  stuck  fast  at  the  race,  and  would 
no  farther.  The  last  step  was  too  bold,  too  much  an  opening 
of  his  soul  to  all  the  universe  for  him  willingly  to  take;  he 
preferred  to  remain  exclusive.  But  in  ourselves,  too,  we  know 
how  it  is:  what  stern  bonds  our  species,  our  race,  our  age,  our 
climatic  temperament,  our  work,  our  wealth  or  penury,  have 
bound  us  in;  it  is  only  in  strictest  limits,  it  would  seem,  that 
we  can  do  the  thing  we  would.  How  far  are  we,  in  sympathy, 
even  yet,  even  we  who  have  named  the  name  of  Christ,  beyond 
old  Dr.  Johnson's  surly  remark,  "For  aught  I  can  see,  all 
foreigners  are  fools"?  Then  too,  how  sadly  we  are  aware  of 
the  law  of  sin  in  our  members,  warring  against  the  law  of  the 
mind.  All  this  is  a  bar  and  discount  to  our  free  individuality: 
we  are,  so  far  forth,  only  levers  and  bolts  and  cog-wheels  in 


1 3o  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

a  colossal  world  machine,  wherein  our  free  play  of  personality 
is  hemmed  in  by  tempers,  customs,  conventions,  congealed 
codes  of  social  law.  We  need,  after  all,  simply  to  submit  our- 
selves to  that  highest  and  freest  impulse,  to  that  inviting  plane 
of  being  prophesied  by  the  whole  spiritual  surge  of  the  ages, 
whereon  our  individual  self  is  at  last  free,  whereon  every  man 
and  every  created  thing  in  its  degree  is  as  it  were  a  second 
self,  with  its  own  rights  and  life,  and  our  soul,  emancipated 
from  the  narrowing  prison  of  the  species,  "lies,"  as  Browning 
puts  it,  "bare  to  the  universal  prick  of  light."  Here  is  the 
strange  paradox  of  the  whole  mutation,  that  just  when  the  in- 
dividual seems  turned  most  out  of  doors,  just  then  his  indi- 
viduality is  most  truly  born  into  the  unitary  life  of  the 
universe. 

But  here  you  say,  "If  the  higher  evolution  is  a  movement 
toward  individuality,  if  the  vast  forces  of  the  universe  have  all 
along  been  in  travail-pangs  to  get  the  completed  individual 
personality  born,  what  becomes  of  our  social  organism?"  Ever 
since  the  French  Revolution  the  generations  have  been  desper- 
ately at  work  on  that  problem:  how  to  bring  about  a  social 
order  wherein  liberty,  equality,  and  fraternity  shall  have  free 
and  full  course.  Haven't  we  had  enough  of  individual  self- 
assertion,  and  has  it  not  proved  merely  that  the  spirit  of  man 
may  thereby  become  only  the  more  arbitrary  and  oppressive, 
only  the  more  shrewd  and  venomous  to  work  his  cleverer  will 
against  his  fellow-man?  Do  we  not  need  rather  to  melt  and 
flow  together  into  one  great  organism  of  humanity,  wherein 
each  individual  soul  shall  get  its  rights  and  the  free  play  of 
life,  and  wherein  the  individual  units  shall  have  disappeared  in 
the  welfare  of  the  whole?  Of  individual  self-assertion  and 
self-containment,  I  answer,  we  have  had  enough  and  more 
than  enough;  it  is  no  recent  thing,  the  world  has  always  had 
it.  And  in  this  new  social  movement  it  is  by  no  means 
quenched;  in  fact  it  has  a  larger  field,  albeit  furtive  and 
hidden,  than  ever.  But  you  see  men  are  trying  to  get  their 
kind  corralled  and  bondaged  under  the  same  old  regime  of  law; 
trying  to  legislate  their  race  into  loving  each  other  and  allowing 


THE  LAW  OF  THE  SPIRIT  OF  LIFE       131 

each  other  their  rights.  Like  the  Galatians  they  will  not  stand 
fast  in  the  liberty  wherewith  Christ  would  make  them  free, 
but  are  desperately  set  on  becoming  entangled  again  with  the 
yoke  of  bondage.  Our  second  birth,  our  mystic  birth  into  full 
individuality,  clears  all  this  up,  if  we  will  but  choose  and  en- 
sue the  full  power  of  it.  For  it  is  the  birth  of  the  free  Godlike 
unit  of  society.  The  fulness  of  the  time,  in  its  slow  coming, 
has  kept  it  back,  just  as  Koheleth  kept  back  the  vision  of  im- 
mortality, until  there  should  be  born  a  personality,  an  indi- 
vidual, fit  to  wield  this  perilous  weapon  of  freedom.  If  society 
starts  from  and  nucleates  in  this  new-born  individuality  as  a 
unit,  then  it  is  sound  and  free  and  Godlike  all  the  way  through. 
And  only  so  can  it  ever  be  such,  strive  and  legislate  and  civilize 
how  men  may.  The  kingdom  of  law  can  never  melt  into  the 
one  livable  kingdom,  the  kingdom  of  grace  and  truth.  We 
must  be  born  again  even  to  see  it;  must  be  born  of  water  and 
spirit  to  enter  its  gates  at  all.  So  to  His  little  audience  of 
disciples,  eager  men  learning  to  be  individual  units  in  the  great 
universe  of  life,  our  Lord  says,  It  is  not  an  affair  of  discovery 
and  legislation  of  which  men  say,  Lo  here,  lo  there;  the  king- 
dom of  heaven,  being  a  thing  to  which  you  are  born,  is  within 
you.  And  when  He  simplified  the  idea,  by  telling  in  parable 
what  it  is  like,  He  said  it  is  like  leaven,  which  a  woman  took 
and  hid  in  three  measures  of  meal,  till  the  whole  was  leavened. 
There  is  the  real  sinking  of  individuality  requisite  for  the  vital- 
ization  of  society:  wherein  every  protoplasmic  grain,  with  its 
free  individuality  in  active  and  vital  energy,  is  spreading  the 
spirit  of  God  from  heart  to  heart  till  the  whole  mass  is  leavened 
and  light  and  joyous,  like  its  unseen  source  of  life,  through 
and  through.  The  individual  is  brought  out  from  the  species 
in  order  that  manhood  henceforth  may  no  more  be 
a  dead  machine,  worked  by  rules  and  conventions  of  alien  will 
and  prescription,  but  saturated,  as  it  were,  and  tingling  in 
every  part,  with  the  free  spirit  of  God  and  man. 

Friends,  our  topic  is  so  large  and  glorious  that  it  seems  never 
to  let  go.  But  I  must  say  of  it  only  one  more  thing.  Our 
discussion  of  things  hitherto  compels  us  to  enlarge  our  view 


132  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

of  the  second  birth  into  wellnigh  boundless  dimensions;  we 
must  rise  to  an  unprecedented  height,  to  cosmic  and  universal 
scale,  to  take  it  in.  It  is  not  a  mere  ecclesiastical  affair;  not 
a  mere  affair  of  getting  a  few  individuals  out  of  the  world  into 
the  church;  though  indeed  we  must  not  discard  this,  for  it  is 
the  way  Christ  took.  But  as  a  church  we  must  enlarge  our 
purview,  our  instrumentalities,  our  quickening  promise  to  the 
souls  in  our  care.  If  not  we,  who  then  is  there  to  do  it?  But 
we  must  walk  in  the  largeness  of  the  law  of  the  spirit  of  life, 
into  which  because  we  see  we  know  that  we  are  new-born; 
recognizing  that  birth  as  the  temporis  partus  maximus,  the 
birth  of  manhood  after  its  longer  period  of  gestation  and 
placental  growth,  as  the  marvelous  event  wherein  the  true 
meaning  of  evolution  declares  itself.  Who  is  sufficient  to  these 
things?  I  thank  God  through  Jesus  Christ  our  Lord.  We 
have  the  mind  of  Christ;  we  have  the  instrumentality  to  our 
hands. 

II.      THE    OUTWARD     CURRENT 

But  after  all,  this  second  birth  of  manhood,  full  of  bound- 
less promise  though  it  be,  is  only  a  birth;  only  an  initial  point, 
a  beginning  to  live;  and  the  whole  mounting  course  of  the  new 
life,  all  that  gives  it  thrust  and  character  and  adultness,  lies 
yet  beyond.  In  fact  we  have  not  yet  discovered  the  real  prin- 
ciple and  essence  of  this  higher  stage  of  personality,  any  more 
than  we  have  seen,  or  can  see,  in  the  new-born  infant,  how  its 
individual  bent  and  endowment  are  going  to  develop.  I  do 
not  wonder  that  at  this  point  of  our  study  you  shake  your 
heads  and  say,  "Well,  I  must  think  it  over."  We  are  still  on 
the  threshold;  the  law  of  the  spirit  of  life  is  yet  to  be  revealed. 

I  think  some  of  our  churches  make  a  mistake  here,  or  rather 
unduly  limit  themselves,  by  laying  so  much  relative  stress  on 
the  moment  of  new  birth,  as  if  all  their  work  and  responsibility 
were  over  as  soon  as  they  have  got  souls  converted.  The  New 
Testament  way  is  rather  to  put  its  strength  into  the  wealth 
of  being  that  ensues  when  the  new  birth  is  taken  for  granted. 


THE  LAW  OF   THE   SPIRIT  OF  LIFE       133 

Where  else,  save  in  this  third  chapter  of  John,  is  this  crisis 
point,  this  emergence  of  the  free  spirit  of  life,  so  rigorously 
demanded  and  defined;  yet  where,  in  the  whole  New  Testa- 
ment, is  it  not  presupposed,  as  if  it  were  to  be  treated  as  an 
accomplished  fact,  determining  once  for  all  the  higher  plane, 
the  table-land,  on  which  henceforth  manhood  life  is  to  move? 
As  far  as  concerns  a  Nicodemus,  whose  being  is  keyed  to  the 
old  dispensation  of  living  by  rule  and  law,  as  far  as  concerns 
every  one  whose  life  is  nothing  but  moral,  this  mystic  entrance 
upon  the  life  of  the  spirit  is  an  absolute  prerequisite  to  further 
evolution.  As  concerns  the  Christian,  moving  spontaneously 
in  the  new  environment  and  atmosphere,  why,  he  was  born  so, 
and  that  is  the  end  of  it.  When  and  how  that  birth  occurred 
is  of  course  another  matter;  but  that  it  consciously  occurred, 
and  with  full  acceptance  of  the  situation,  is  a  thing  taken  for 
granted  and  no  more  said.  To  treat  the  event  as  if  it  were 
always  in  uncertain  abeyance,  or  as  if  the  soul  thus  born  were 
always  to  be  held  back  by  main  force  and  constant  revival  from 
lapsing  into  a  pre-natal  state,  is  neither  of  logic  nor  of  science 
nor  of  faith. 

But  as  I  said,  it  is  only  a  birth:  that  is  why  we  can  afford 
to  forget,  or  rather  presuppose  it,  as  we  do  our  bodily  birth, 
while  we  concentrate  our  energies  on  the  things  that  really 
count,  that  consort  with  it.  What  these  things  essentially  are, 
we  are  now  to  note;  but  first  let  us  glance  again,  in  summary 
fashion,  at  what  this  second  birth  has  and  has  not  contributed 
to  the  Life  Indeed. 

What  to  this  point  has  stood  out  most  prominently  in  its 
contribution  to  life  is  emancipation.  By  it  the  individual  unit 
of  the  higher  evolution,  the  vital  molecule,  so  to  say,  has  be- 
come a  centre  of  spiritual  force,  free  to  choose  and  work  its 
work  on  the  individual  at  its  side,  and  to  receive  returns  of 
influence  from  it;  each  so  becoming  a  thinking  active  grain  of 
leaven,  and  all  vitalized  by  a  spirit  which,  "infused  through 
the  mighty  mass,  pervades,  feeds,  unites,  invigorates,  vivifies 
every  part  .  .  .  even  down  to  the  minutest  member."  This 
is  a  tremendous  point  gained.  And  it  can  be  gained  only  by 


134  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

such  freedom  of  wisdom  and  action;  by  making  each  unit  a 
vital  centre  in  the  tissue,  or  as  St.  Peter,  who  wrote  before  the 
days  of  biology,  figures  it,  a  "lively  stone"  in  the  vast  edifice 
of  life. 

But  when  you  come  to  think  of  it,  freedom  is  a  negative, 
colorless  thing;  perilous  too,  beyond  computation,  unless  there 
is  something  sterling  behind  it.  To  present  a  man  with  free- 
dom is  like  presenting  him  with  a  blank  sheet  of  paper,  on 
which  he  can  write  any  record  he  pleases.  Nothing  has  been 
so  abused,  or  so  awkwardly  handled,  as  liberty.  "O  Liberty!" 
you  remember  was  exclaimed  in  the  French  Revolution,  "what 
crimes  are  committed  in  thy  name!"  And  hardly  less  grave 
than  the  crimes  of  liberty  is  the  unwisdom  that  so  easily  besets 
it,  not  to  speak  of  the  pinches  of  downright  tyranny  and  in- 
tolerance. How  hard  it  is  both  to  live  and  let  live !  How  many 
a  man,  too,  whose  spirit  is  emancipated,  who  rejoices  in  the 
law  of  liberty  after  the  inner  man,  becomes  enslaved  again,  be- 
fore he  knows  it,  to  some  new  order  of  bondage:  some  doubtful 
business  enterprise,  or  soulless  corporation,  or  tyrannous 
union,  in  which  the  individuality  that  is  new-born  in  him  is 
lost  and  belied.  You  remember  how  Bunyan  said  that  the 
second  part  of  the  Valley  of  the  Shadow  of  Death  was,  if  pos- 
sible, more  beset  with  dangers  than  the  first;  only  they  were 
dangers  of  another  kind,  not  the  ditch  and  quag  now,  but 
snares  and  traps  and  pitfalls,  in  which  the  unwary  soul,  or  the 
soul  without  daylight,  was  sure  to  be  caught.  Clearly,  freedom 
of  itself  is  a  doubtful  blessing.  It  was  not  made  to  go  alone. 
What  then  shall  go  with  it,  to  safeguard  it,  keeping  it  from 
lapsing  either  into  another  slavery  or  into  wild  anarchy?  Can 
the  spirit  of  man,  after  all,  be  trusted  with  so  perilous  a  gift? 
Can  the  law  of  the  spirit  of  life  function  as  a  real  law,  a  con- 
servator of  order  and  wisdom,  and  not  a  fluid,  arbitrary,  ca- 
pricious wilfulness?  If  not,  then  the  fulness  of  time  is  here 
in  vain;  and  evolution  has  come  all  this  way  to  go  to  pieces 
at  the  end. 

Here,  friends,  at  last,  is  the  time  and  the  place  to  name  the 
solution  of  the  whole  boundless  problem,  the  supreme  pulsa- 


THE  LAW  OF   THE  SPIRIT  OF  LIFE       135 

tion  of  the  Life  Indeed.  I  have  kept  it  back,  running  the  risk 
of  vagueness  and  dim  inklings  of  the  matter  until  I  could  trace 
all  the  broad  steps  of  reason  and  science  that  led  up  to  it;  I 
wanted  you  in  some  just  degree  to  realize  how  great  it  is,  this 
keystone  of  the  arch,  when  it  falls  into  its  ordained  place.  The 
safeguard  of  the  new-born  freedom,  the  fulfiller  of  the  law,  the 
proof  that  the  spirit  of  man  is  in  its  heart  of  hearts  sound  and 
sterling,  the  guarantee  of  an  evolution  that  grows  onward  to 
the  light  unapproachable,  is  —  LOVE.  The  spirit  that  long 
ago  brooded  on  the  face  of  the  waters  and  the  human  spirit, 
that  step  by  step  rose  to  find  its  unseen  witnessing  and  thereby 
advanced  steadily  toward  light  and  liberty,  have  in  this  mighty 
pulsation  of  love,  or  grace,  as  the  Scripture  calls  it,  declared 
themselves  to  the  worlds  and  the  eternities;  and  we  have  the 
final  opening  of  the  mystery  now,  the  mystery  that  was  hid 
from  ages  and  generations.  What  was  that  vital  motion  in- 
fused through  the  vast  evolutionary  mass,  we  have  been  asking, 
and  no  answer  could  give  the  whole  key  to  it.  Not  mere  arbi- 
trary power  and  will;  not  that,  for  man  found  in  his  heart  an 
excellence  greater  than  that,  a  human  worth  against  which 
mere  power,  with  all  its  tyrannous  potencies,  was  weakness 
itself.  Not  mere  wisdom,  the  infinite  knowledge  which  adapted 
means  to  ends,  and  brought  a  world-order  and  beauty  into 
being;  not  that,  for  the  spirit  of  man  found  that  wisdom  itself 
must  bow  to  a  mightier  master,  else  its  many  inventions  would 
go  hopelessly  astray;  not  the  absoluteness  of  mere  justice  and 
judgment;  not  that,  for  in  every  tract  of  that  hard  heartless 
empire  which  such  governance  would  engender  must  be  left 
open  and  available  a  still  larger  area  of  mercy,  allowance,  for- 
giveness. Somehow,  in  the  midst  of  his  twilight  of  law  and 
growing  wisdom  and  sense  of  infinite  power,  the  spirit  of  man 
was  borne  onward  toward  the  conviction  that  to  know  all  was 
not  to  punish  all  but  to  forgive  all.  After  all,  we  are  not  the 
culprits  of  God,  not  the  quarry  slaves  of  God,  but  the  sons  of 
God;  and  the  vital  pulsation  that  courses  back  and  forth  be- 
tween us  and  the  Father  of  spirits  is  the  communion  of  that 
love  whose  expression  is  fatherhood  and  sonship.  This  is  the 


136  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

illuminate  and  determining  hemisphere  of  the  tremendous  map 
of  life,  the  central  character  which  forever  sets  off  the  new  dis- 
pensation of  things  over  against  the  old.  "The  law,"  as  St. 
John  defines  it,  "was  given  by  Moses;  but  grace  and  truth 
came  by  Jesus  Christ."  When  this  revelation  was  made,  men 
began  to  live;  and  the  world,  by  a  divinely  inspired  instinct, 
has  numbered  its  years  from  that  date,  nineteen  full  centuries 
now,  during  which,  eagerly  exploring  its  various  potencies, 
men  have  hardly  yet  begun  to  sound  its  depths  and  are  lagging 
far  behind  the  unspeakable  heights  of  it.  Why,  here  is  work 
cut  out  for  an  eternity:  just  to  realize  and  embody,  to  spread 
and  naturalize,  the  endless  potentialities  of  love. 

Love,  in  that  central  pulsation  which  is  the  heart  of  love, 
namely,  unbought  undeserved  grace,  is  the  supreme  and  ab- 
solutely new  contribution  of  the  fulness  of  the  time  to  the 
wealth  of  the  world.  Nothing  like  it,  except  as  dim  and 
sporadic  adumbrations  of  it,  was  ever  named  and  naturalized 
among  men  before.  "The  real  difference  between  Paganism 
and  Christianity,"  says  G.  K.  Chesterton,  "is  perfectly 
summed  up  in  the  difference  between  the  pagan,  or  natural, 
virtues,  and  those  three  virtues  of  Christianity  which  the 
Church  of  Rome  calls  virtues  of  grace.  The  pagan,  or  rational, 
virtues  are  such  things  as  justice  and  temperance,  and  Christi- 
anity has  adopted  them.  The  three  mystical  virtues  which 
Christianity  has  not  adopted,  but  invented,  are  faith,  hope,  and 
charity"  —  or  as  we  better  translate,  love;  and  as  St.  Paul 
says,  the  greatest  of  these  is  love.  "Behold,"  says  Isaiah,  "the 
former  things  are  come  to  pass"  —  shall  we  not  say  the  former 
ideals  of  justice  and  temperance?  —  "and  new  things  do  I  de- 
clare: before  they  spring  forth  I  tell  you  of  them.  ...  Be- 
hold, I  will  do  a  new  thing;  now  it  shall  spring  forth;  shall  ye 
not  know  it?  I  will  even  make  a  way  in  the  wilderness,  and 
rivers  in  the  desert."  I  shall  have  further  occasion  to  quote 
how  Mr.  Chesterton  sets  forth  the  uniqueness  of  these  virtues 
of  grace;  here  I  merely  record  the  distinction,  that  you  may 
have  it  as  a  point  de  repere  to  bear  in  mind;  that  you  may 
know  once  for  all  what  was  the  real  meaning  of  things  when, 


THE  LAW  OF   THE   SPIRIT  OF  LIFE       137 

at  the  end  of  days  the  Lord  rose  up  and  was  wroth,  as  the 
prophet  put  it,  that  he  might  do  his  work,  his  strange  work, 
and  bring  to  pass  his  act,  his  strange  act.  It  was  the  evolu- 
tion of  grace,  in  the  heart  of  manhood.  With  this  in  mind 
our  business  now  is,  to  fit  this  in,  if  we  may,  to  our  adopted 
evolutionary  framework. 

All  along  we  have  been  aware,  through  the  pre-Christian 
ages,  of  a  vague  prevailing  sense  of  something  lacking.  The 
spirit  of  man  could  not  rest  in  its  manhood  attainment;  it 
recognized  its  manhood  as  incomplete,  its  supreme  prophetic 
vision  was  of  a  coming  manhood,  in  which  man  could  see  and 
be  what  he  deeply  felt  it  in  him  to  be.  This  is  not  speculation 
or  philosophy;  it  is  recorded  fact;  we  have  that  actual  pro- 
phetic pulsation  of  the  human  spirit  to  reckon  with.  Nor  is 
it  ancient  history  alone;  it  is  the  present  experience  of  the 
finest,  deepest-seeing  poetic  souls.  In  a  world  full  of  beauty 
and  splendor,  of  work  and  achievement,  of  ideals  of  justice  and 
self-control,  yet  the  key  of  things  was  so  conspicuously  lacking 
that  to  many  a  sensitive  heart  all  seemed,  as  to  Hamlet,  aa 
foul  and  pestilent  congregation  of  vapours."  You  remember 
how  Browning  has  put  this  into  a  poem,  and  supplied  the  key. 
"Wanting,"  he  says,  — 

Wanting  is  —  what? 

Summer  redundant, 

Blueness  abundant, 

—  Where  is  the  blot? 

Beamy  the  world,  yet  a  blank  all  the  same, 
—  Framework    which    waits    for    a    picture    to    frame: 
What  of  the  leafage,  what  of  the  flower? 
Roses   embowering   with   naught    they   embower! 
Come  then,  complete  incompletion,  O  comer, 
Pant  through  the  blueness,  perfect  the  summer! 

Breathe  but  one  breath 

Rose-beauty  above, 

And  all  that  was  death 

Grows  life,  grows  love, 
Grows  love ! 

This,  you  say,  is  a  poet's  dream,  not  science.  Well,  then 
let  us  interrogate  art.  Did  you  ever  see  that  wonderful  pic- 


138  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

ture  of  Albrecht  Durer's,  on  which  he  inscribed  the  word 
"MELANCHOLIA"?  Diirer,  you  know,  was  the  friend  of  Luther 
and  Melanchthon  and  Erasmus,  a  man  of  whom  was  said, 
"His  least  merit  was  his  art";  and  he  made  this  picture  in  1514, 
seven  years  before  Luther's  great  confession  at  Worms,  at  a 
time  when  the  Revival  of  Learning,  then  in  full  sway,  was  able, 
as  man  had  not  been  since  Christ,  to  record  the  marvelous 
energies  and  achievements  of  the  spirit  of  man.  This  picture, 
the  verdict  of  the  greatest  master  of  the  German  renaissance 
on  his  day,  portrays  at  once  its  greatness  and  its  sad  futility. 
A  female  winged  figure,  the  very  embodiment  of  human  wis- 
dom and  might,  her  head  crowned  with  the  laurel,  and  with 
keys  and  a  great  purse  at  her  girdle,  sits  at  the  foot  of  a  half- 
built  tower,  whose  unfinished  top  is  out  of  sight  beyond  the 
picture.  It  is  done  as  far  as  the  first  string  course,  the  base- 
ment story,  so  to  say;  and  on  one  wall  of  it  hang  the  even- 
balanced  scales  of  justice,  on  the  other  the  hour-glass,  its  sands 
almost  run,  the  passing-bell  ready  to  ring  the  final  hour,  and 
the  magic  square  which  in  every  direction,  vertically,  horizon- 
tally, diagonally,  foots  up  ever  the  same,  the  emblem,  it  would 
seem,  of  a  rounded,  self-contained  life.  The  woman  sits  look- 
ing at  a  shapeless  block  of  stone,  and  with  a  great  pair  of  com- 
passes is  evidently  trying,  but  hopelessly  as  her  countenance 
indicates,  to  plan  how  it  may  be  fitted  into  the  edifice  above. 
There  the  ladder  is,  all  ready,  the  refractory  stone  at  the  foot 
of  it;  but  scattered  on  the  ground  lie  the  discarded  instruments 
of  art  and  research,  the  jagged  and  worn-out  saw,  the  useless 
plane,  the  broken  T-square,  the  idle  hammer;  while  the  sphere, 
the  symbol  of  perfection,  lies  reproachfully  at  her  feet,  an  un- 
approachable pattern,  and  the  crucible  beyond  contains  no 
secret  of  the  ultimate  elements  of  being.  By  her  side  on  a 
large  mill-stone  —  emblem,  this  stone,  of  grinding  labor  —  sits 
a  winged  child  with  stylus  and  tablet,  and  the  fringed  cloth 
that  makes  its  seat  easier  seems  to  tell  of  that  contented  spirit 
which  rejoices  in  work  as  its  portion;  but  the  child  is  asleep 
over  its  reckoning,  and  at  the  foot  of  the  stone  lies  a  dog,  also 
fast  asleep.  All  betokens  a  stoppage  and  deadlock  of  achieve- 


THE  LAW  OF   THE   SPIRIT  OF  LIFE       139 

ment;  the  woman  only  being  awake,  but  awake  to  the  most 
hopeless  thoughts.  Yet  beyond,  on  the  shore  of  the  limitless 
ocean,  is  a  prosperous  city,  with  its  stateliness,  its  marts,  and 
the  ships  of  commerce  in  its  harbor;  no  indication  here  of 
human  failure;  while  in  the  sky  of  the  background  the  most 
conspicuous  object,  filling  it  all  with  its  exaggerated  rays,  is 
what  we  hardly  know  whether  to  call  a  sun  or  a  baleful  comet, 
whether  betokening  glory  or  doom,  an  object  left  thus  ambigu- 
ous, perhaps,  of  the  artist's  intent.  But  crossing  its  equivocal 
rays,  firm  and  solid  as  if  built  into  Nature,  is  the  rainbow  of 
promise;  while  flying  away  with  a  cry  into  the  night,  its  back 
turned  to  sun  and  rainbow,  is  a  strange  bat-like  creature  bear- 
ing on  its  uncouth  wings  the  legend  "MELANCHOLIA."  Such  is 
this  speaking  picture,  eloquent  in  every  smallest  detail.  What 
spirit  of  life  shall  break  this  deadlock  and  rouse  the  sleepers? 
Who  shall  square  that  shapeless  block,  shapeless  but  noble  in 
size  and  texture,  and  fit  it  for  its  place  in  the  edifice  above? 
For  that  winged  spirit  of  man  has  reached  her  limit  of  power; 
earth's  splendid  resources  -are  exhausted,  and  the  tower  is  un- 
finished; if  the  game  is  to  go  on,  a  God,  it  would  seem,  must 
mingle  with  it. 

This  picture  of  Diirer's,  unlike  Browning's  poem,  fails  to 
vouchsafe  any  key  to  the  situation.  It  portrays  merely  a 
standstill  and  an  enigma.  Even  the  winged  child,  if  it  is  in- 
tended for  the  conventional  figure  of  love,  is  merely  love  ab- 
sorbed in  art  and  work,  and  it  is  asleep.  A  similar  record  of 
deadlock  in  the  Bible,  however,  supplies,  in  the  writer's  own 
idiom,  a  hint  of  what  is  needed  to  clear  the  situation.  I  refer 
now  to  Koheleth,  and  his  trenchant  yet  true  assessment  of  his 
legalized,  toil-ridden  world.  It  is  something,  you  know,  to  have 
reached  the  point  where,  whether  we  know  the  remedy  or  not, 
we  can  diagnose  the  disease.  Well,  this  is  what  Koheleth  did 
for  his  pre-Christian  era.  Like  Goethe,  — 

He  took  the  suffering  human  race, 

He   read  each   wound,  each   weakness  clear; 

And  struck  his  finger  on  the  place, 

And  said:  Thou  attest  here,  and  here! 


I4o  THE   LIFE  INDEED 

Koheleth,  you  know,  looks  out  into  the  world  from  much  the 
same  as  Diirer's  point  of  view,  the  point  of  view  of  labor  and 
art,  and  cheerily  bids  man  rejoice  in  his  work;  but  at  the  end 
his  verdict  is,  all  vanity,  futility,  a  chase  after  wind.  It  is 
the  same  verdict  from  the  under  side  that  St.  Paul  afterward 
pronounces  from  the  upper,  in  saying  that  the  creation  was 
made  subject  to  vanity,  a  vanity  not  of  its  own  willing.  St. 
Paul  tells  why;  Koheleth  merely  puts  his  finger  on  the  ailing 
spot,  in  his  question,  "What  profit  hath  man  in  all  his  labor, 
which  he  laboreth  under  the  sun?"  The  thing  that  is  lacking, 
in  all  this  busy  work,  in  all  this  ordered  life,  of  the  world,  is 
profit,  something  to  make  the  work  worth  doing,  the  life  worth 
living.  Koheleth,  being  not  a  modern  scientist  but  a  Jew, 
speaks  in  his  Jewish  idiom  of  business;  but  the  fact  that  he 
immediately  applies  his  question  to  the  ongoings  of  nature  and 
history  indicates  that  by  profit  he  has  something  more  in  mind 
than  work  and  wages,  or  dollars  and  cents.  The  word  means 
literally  surplusage.  What  surplusage :  what  is  there  left  over, 
when  a  man's  work,  when  a  generation's  work,  when  the 
world's  work  is  done?  And  you  remember  how  the  lack  of 
surplusage  in  life  is  emphasized  by  his  thought  of  things  re- 
turning on  themselves,  like  a  great  wheel  that  comes  round 
full  circle  and  starts  again,  ever  again,  but  does  not  get  for- 
ward; so  that  when  you  compare  generations  each  with  each 
there  is  nothing  new  under  the  sun. 

Such  is  Koheleth's  picture  of  his  world,  comparable  to 
Diirer's;  I  have  spoken  of  it  many  times  here,  because  to  me 
it  is  the  most  fundamental  and  searching  estimate  of  the  old 
dispensation  that  exists;  and  besides  it  furnishes  the  evolu- 
tionary clue  to  the  new  birth  that  here  takes  place.  Surplus- 
age; surplusage  of  life;  vitality,  as  it  were,  liberated  to  excess, 
overflowing;  life  enough  for  the  soul's  own  needs,  and  life  to 
spare  for  the  needs  of  others:  that  is  what  the  dead-locked 
world  needed,  and  what  in  the  fulness  of  time  it  began  to  have. 
Koheleth  had  raised  the  inquiry  "What  surplusage?"  and 
searching  into  life  had  found  little  shreds  of  it  here  and  there, 
in  wisdom,  in  the  joy  of  the  God-appointed  work,  in  the  faith 


THE  LAW  OF   THE   SPIRIT  OF  LIFE       141 

which  takes  all  chances.  But  he  had  not  learned  to  give  this 
overflow  of  life  the  right  name;  had  not  reached  its  innermost 
secret;  and  so  his  search  for  surplusage  remained  largely  a 
thing  of  shreds  and  patches,  nay  pathetically  small,  compared 
with  the  immense  reality.  This  we  can  see,  as  soon  as  the 
reality  stands  before  us.  When  He  who  embodied  it  came, 
and  told  the  world  what  He  came  for:  after  describing  the 
earlier  ones,  who  came  and  lived  only  for  what  they  could  get, 
He  said  of  Himself:  "I  am  come  that  they  might  have  life, 
and  that  they  might  have  it  more  abundantly."  His  word 
is  Trepurcrov,  literally  and  exactly  this  idea  of  Koheleth's; 
-  that  they  might  have  a  surplus,  an  overflow  of 
life.  His  whole  attitude  to  life,  and  all  the  conduct  He 
founded  on  it,  was  keyed  to  this  idea  of  self-impartation: 
life  imparted,  flowing  out  like  the  waters  of  a  fountain,  work- 
ing to  vitalize  other  lives;  and  not  at  all  as  a  thing  taken  in, 
gloated  over  and  made  luxurious,  or  employed  merely  for  what 
could  be  got  out  of  it.  This  self-impartation  of  life,  put  into 
character,  can  mean  nothing  less,  nothing  other,  than  loving 
your  fellow-man.  Under  law,  you  either  work  for  wages  or 
else  try  to  dodge  the  penalty  of  transgression;  that  is  about 
what  it  reduces  to;  and  it  is  all  a  self-regarding,  self-seeking, 
self-cultivating,  and  so  inward-flowing  current  of  spirit,  which 
makes  yourself  the  centre  of  your  system.  Under  love  all  this 
is  reversed;  the  spiritual  current  is  outward,  flowing  to  give 
life  and  joy  and  truth  to  other  hearts;  but  you  do  not  im- 
poverish, rather  you  enrich  your  own  life  thereby.  You  are 
a  great  deal  more  of  a  man  than  you  were  before;  you  have 
secured  the  supreme  significance  of  manhood.  In  other  words, 
you  have  all  the  life  you  need  for  your  own  uses  and  more,  nay, 
becoming  more  as  it  spends  itself;  every  pulsation  of  love  for 
your  fellow-man  is  a  veritable  overflow  of  life,  from  the  vital- 
ized heart  into  the  world.  That  is  the  reason  why  I  entitle 
this  section  The  Outward  Current.  From  a  living  soul,  as 
St.  Paul  expresses  it,  man  has  become  a  life-giving  spirit;  it 
is  this  reversed  current  of  being  that  has  made  him  so. 

Here  I  think  we  have  an  idea  of  life  that  fits  into  our  evo- 


I42  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

lutionary  conception.  It  is  the  law  of  the  spirit  of  life  that  at 
the  critical  point  where  manhood  evolution  merges  into  its 
highest  and  adult  stage,  there  takes  place  what  may  be  called 
a  liberation  of  the  life-force  to  excess,  an  overflow  of  vitality; 
so  that  thenceforth  the  man  is  not  merely  self-contained  and 
self-regarding,  not  merely  a  reservoir  of  vitality;  but  a  foun- 
tain of  vitality,  a  source  of  life  and  refreshment  to  the  world, 
self-imparting  and  self-forgetting.  This  is  the  ideal,  put  in 
quasi-chemical  terms.  It  is  the  supply  of  what  Koheleth  felt 
the  lack  of:  the  surplusage,  which  in  his  world  was  so  doubt- 
ful, yet  to  his  prophetic  soul  was  so  needful  an  element  to 
progress.  This  elementary  conception  of  it  has  many  conno- 
tations: it  has  to  be  accommodated,  in  fact,  to  every  dialect 
of  life.  We  have  spoken  of  the  soul  under  tutelage  of  law, 
and  with  the  sense  of  being  a  minor;  well,  here  the  majority 
bell  has  struck,  and  henceforth  the  soul  is  self-directive,  a 
man  among  men.  We  have  spoken  of  a  pervading  sense  of 
bondage  and  fear;  well,  here  the  consciousness  that  fills  the 
soul  is  the  sense  of  freedom  and  confidence.  We  have  spoken 
of  the  man  whose  individuality  was  baffled  by  his  earthly  and 
hereditary  conditions;  well,  here  the  spirit  that  is  in  him  has 
free  course  to  pour  itself  forth  spontaneously  on  the  world 
and  on  the  task;  and  the  key  to  it  all,  its  absolute  guarantee 
of  safety  and  sanity,  is,  that  this  overflow  of  a  vitality  derived 
from  the  spirit  of  God  is  just  the  emergence  and  pure  impulse 
of  love.  In  this  all  the  stress  and  struggle  after  law,  obedience, 
righteousness,  and  all  the  livable  relations  with  the  world, 
reaches  its  perfect  and  as  it  were  natural  solution.  He  that 
loves  his  neighbor  works  him  no  ill;  therefore  love  is  the  ful- 
filling of  the  law.  The  ideal  of  fulfilment  so  long  sought  is 
reached  at  one  easy  bound,  as  soon  as  the  spirit  rays  outward, 
as  soon  as  love  is  in  free  play.  But  how  crude  and  rudimental 
this  fulfilling  looks,  by  the  side  of  what  more  love  brings  into 
life.  Fulfilling  of  law  is  merely  the  negative  and  inert  side  of 
love  —  worketh  no  ill,  virtually  leaving  neighbor  alone  —  and 
yet  the  law,  as  such,  is  satisfied.  But  over  against  it  put  the 
whole  new  world  of  life  values  and  activities,  when  the  spirit, 


THE  LAW  OF  THE  SPIRIT  OF  LIFE       143 

vitalized  by  love,  overflows  in  good  sympathies  and  good 
works,  forgetting  self,  or  rather  finding  its  truest  self-interest 
in  the  welfare  of  neighbor  and  the  new-birth  of  a  world. 

Such  are  the  evolutionary  aspects  of  the  case;  and  while 
the  contemplation  of  them  throws  light  on  the  depths  and  in- 
volvements of  being,  yet  fortunately  the  world  did  not  have 
to  wait  for  the  era  of  scientific  research  to  get  its  revelation 
of  this  profoundest  truth  of  the  world.  We  can  get  at  it  best, 
indeed,  by  attending  to  the  limpid  simplicities  of  the  matter. 
Love  is,  after  all,  the  great  simplifies  When  our  Lord  put 
before  men  the  kingdom  of  God,  to  which  men  must  be  born, 
He  treated  that  birth  as  a  beginning  of  the  simplest,  sweetest 
things;  and  setting  a  child  in  the  midst,  He  said  that  men 
must  receive  the  kingdom  of  heaven  as  a  little  child.  We  can 
see  why,  when  love  is  the  light  of  our  seeing.  Simple  and 
natural  as  it  is,  it  is  the  mark  of  that  growth  of  the  spirit 
which  we  have  already  noted,  wherein  men  dare  to  love  and 
trust  instead  of  to  fear  and  fight.  A  little  child,  in  its  perfect 
openness  of  love  and  trust,  is  the  bravest  being  in  the  world, 
brave  because  so  unconscious  of  its  courage,  the  bravest  and 
the  most  overcoming.  It  has  found  the  sublimely  clear  way 
to  the  conquest  of  the  kingdom.  Yes,  the  child  on  its  mill- 
stone, asleep  over  its  uncongenial  work,  must  awake  and  be- 
come the  dominating  influence  of  the  picture;  and  as  it  sends 
its  ray  of  trustful  love  into  the  energies  of  things,  and  thus 
takes  the  helm  of  progress,  the  hard  strained  look  will  melt 
from  that  mighty  spirit  of  man,  and  the  compasses  will  strike 
the  right  line,  and  the  shapeless  block  will  round  into  the  per- 
fect pattern,  the  completed  sphere  of  character  and  destiny. 
No  more  a  magic  self-contained  square,  with  the  passing-bell 
already  trembling  to  strike  above  it,  but  the  sphere  of  per- 
fected relations,  heart  to  heart  and  man  to  man,  ready  for 
its  place  at  the  top  of  the  ladder,  where  the  tower  goes  up  out 
of  sight.  Wagner,  you  know,  in  his  Parsifal,  is  dreaming  of 
an  innocent  fool  who  shall  heal  the  diseases  and  foulnesses  of 
the  world;  in  his  Lohengrin,  of  a  spotless  yet  ignorant  knight 
who  shall  overcome;  in  his  Siegfried,  of  an  untutored,  run-wild 


144  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

product  of  nature,  who  shall  somehow,  in  the  twilight  of  the 
heathen  gods,  open  the  new  radiance  of  Christianity.  But 
none  of  them  strike  into  the  ongoings  of  the  world  as  a  force 
and  power  there;  they  do  not  create  but  only  suffer  and 
achieve;  and  they  all  leave  the  intractable  world  at  last,  by 
death,  or  treachery,  or  translation,  —  leave  it  with  only  the 
memory  of  a  vision.  Our  Lord  opens  the  simpler  way,  the 
way  not  for  the  exceptional  knight  or  giant  or  fool,  but  for 
every  common  man  and  every  prosaic  life.  Receive  the  king- 
dom of  heaven  as  a  little  child;  dare  in  the  perfect  courage  of 
the  childlike  heart  to  love  and  trust,  to  lay  aside  fear 
and  fighting  and  the  strain  and  strenuousness  of  puzzled  study, 
and  the  door  of  the  kingdom  of  heaven  lies  wide  open.  How 
many  are  ready,  even  in  this  age  of  the  world,  to  commit  them- 
selves to  this  simple  ideal  of  love,  accepting  it  without  reserva- 
tions and  safeguardings  on  this  side  and  that,  and  to  ensue  the 
consequences? 

One  difficulty  is,  and  has  been,  that  men,  though  looking 
out  into  the  universe  and  seeing  love  and  mercy  there,  have 
been  too  ready  to  treat  that  love  as  working  only  in  one  direc- 
tion; only  in  the  direction  from  heaven  to  earth.  As  the  long- 
suffering  love  of  God  became  more  evident  to  them,  they  have 
hastened  to  accept  it  and  make  it  available  for  their  purposes, 
without  adequate  committal  to  the  human  return  it  should  en- 
gender. The  power  that  evolves  the  universe  is  a  spirit  that 
loves  and  forgives;  what  then  shall  the  recipient  of  such  favor 
do  about  it?  Receive  it  and  make  use  of  it,  of  course;  but  too 
many  have  stopped  there,  and  just  have  banked  on  it,  as  one 
more  instrument  for  furthering  their  own  alien  ends.  Like 
Heine's  blasphemous  wit  on  his  death-bed,  after  a  consciously 
misspent  life,  their  lives  have  too  often  and  too  affrontingly 
said,  "God  will  forgive,  c'est  son  metier,  it  is  His  trade."  And 
so  that  love  of  God  has  been  allowed  to  minister  to  their  greed 
and  their  lazy  transgression;  they  have  lived  their  old  selfish 
life  and  banked  on  getting  forgiveness  at  the  end.  This  is  not 
childlikeness;  it  is  mere  perverse  childishness.  But  you  must 
note  this:  that  this  revelation  of  mercy  and  allowance,  is  just 


THE  LAW  OF   THE   SPIRIT  OF  LIFE       145 

the  polar  opposite  of  self-seeking  or  even  of  justice:  it  pro- 
claims the  spirit  of  God  as  a  spirit  of  free  grace,  as  love  un- 
bought,  undeserved,  pouring  itself  forth  on  the  world  out  of 
its  own  infinite  fulness.  That  is  the  only  true  interpretation 
of  love;  all  that  stops  short  of  this  contains  still  some  tinge  of 
barter,  of  reward,  of  commercialism.  And  that  is  the  interpre- 
tation which  has  been  coming  slowly,  —  how  slowly,  and  with 
what  difficulty,  —  into  the  free  ideals  of  manhood.  It  is  the 
outward  current,  the  free  unrestrained  overflow  and  surplus- 
age, which  because  it  is  felt  in  the  universe,  is  by  that  fact 
recognized  as  the  real  ideal  of  manhood  and  life.  If  the  spirit 
bearing  witness  with  ours  is  the  spirit  of  God,  how  can  our 
spirit  find  true  communion  otherwise  than  as  a  spirit  of  grace, 
daring  to  love  not  because  our  neighbor  is  lovable  and  deserv- 
ing, not  even  because  thereby  we  would  secure  his  answering 
love  and  so  conserve  our  greater  dignity  and  safety,  but  be- 
cause our  spirit  of  love  flows  in  the  same  majestic  direction  as 
the  mystic  spirit  that  witnesses  with  it.  Love  unprovoked, 
without  reference  to  payment  or  consequences;  such  is  the 
ideal  of  life  that  is  struggling  to  the  birth.  When  we  see  its 
height  and  depth  as  it  is,  how  can  we  regard  it  otherwise  than 
as  a  transcendent  element  of  life,  a  miracle,  if  you  please,  from 
the  unseen  places,  far  beyond  the  scope  of  what  may  be  com- 
manded, far  outrunning  the  empire  of  law.  Yet  with  the  ful- 
ness of  time  the  ideal  has  come;  a  veritable  law  of  the  spirit 
of  life;  we  cannot  deny  it,  we  cannot  attain  rest  until  it  is  in 
us.  You  remember  how  absolutely,  how  uncompromisingly, 
St.  Paul  has  set  it  forth,  by  drawing  out  a  kind  of  scale  of 
values,  measuring  it  by  the  response  that  different  shades  of 
life  elicit.  "For  scarcely  for  a  righteous  man,"  he  says,  "will 
one  die,  yet  peradventure  for  a  good  man  some  would  even 
dare  to  die."  The  human  response  may  be  put  forth  haltingly 
and  sporadically  when  some  worthy  man  comes  who  deserves 
it,  some  man  whose  disinterested  love  elicits  an  answer  after 
its  own  kind.  "But,"  the  ideal  goes  relentlessly  on  to  say, 
"God  commendeth  his  love  toward  us,  in  that,  while  we  were 
yet  sinners,  Christ  dies  for  us."  And  who  is  Christ?  Is  he 


146  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

not  bone  of  our  bone,  and  flesh  of  our  flesh;  is  He  not,  in  truth, 
the  coming  Man,  whom  law  has  struggled  to  create,  and  proph- 
ecy has  worked  into  progressive  vision?  Is  not  this  the  per- 
fect, ultimate  expression  of  that  liberation  of  the  spirit  to 
excess,  that  surplusage  and  overflow  of  love,  which  stops  not 
at  desert  or  answering  worthiness  in  the  object,  but  is  the  copy 
of  the  spirit  of  God?  And  if  one  died  for  all,  then  were  all 
dead.  There,  my  friends,  whether  you  take  it  or  leave  it,  there 
is  the  ultimate  ideal  of  manhood's  capabilities. 

"It  is  high,  I  cannot  attain  unto  it,"  is  doubtless  the  answer 
that  springs  into  your  heart  here.  Yes,  it  is  high,  as  heaven 
is  above  earth;  yet  the  holiest  manhood  is  committed  to  it; 
we  are  bound  that  way;  we  remain  in  deadlock,  surrounded 
by  the  broken  implements  of  our  toil,  without  it.  And  what 
less  can  we  augur  of  an  evolution  that  begins  with  the  brooding 
spirit  of  God,  warming  into  life  the  timid  and  halting,  yet 
ever  more  confident,  reactions  of  the  human  spirit?  Why, 
here  is  the  point  where  the  spirit  of  man,  stronger  at  last  than 
death,  steps  forth  free,  adult,  master  of  its  impulses  and  ac- 
tions. Men  have  tried,  as  we  saw  at  the  beginning  of  our 
study,  to  peer  curiously  into  that  spirit's  destiny,  by  interro- 
gating the  occult,  by  exploring  the  dim  tracts  of  psychism  and 
hypnotism  and  mediumship  and  dreams;  but  all  they  could 
discover  was  a  mysterious  underworld  of  subliminal  conscious- 
ness, out  of  which  came  here  and  there  a  fitful  flash  of  some 
strange  unclassified  power,  they  knew  not  what.  Was  it  not 
their  mistake  that  they  were  looking  toward  the  underworld, 
down  toward  the  instinctive  rudiments  of  being,  where  men 
are  still  the  puppets  of  arbitrary  nature?  No,  not  downward 
is  the  direction,  but  inward,  inward,  inward,  to  the  central 
point  where,  in  the  dawning  of  light,  the  spirit  of  man  and  the 
spirit  of  God  are  beginning  their  communion  together,  in  a 
mystic  common  witness  of  which  nothing  but  the  final  seeing 
eye  to  eye  in  love,  and  the  final  cooperation  in  the  work  of  a 
kingdom,  can  be  the  key.  I  believe  it  is  so.  The  central  rudi- 
mental  instinct  is  the  instinct  of  the  spirit;  and  the  only 
worthy  definition  and  dignity  of  that  we  find  in  the  creative 


THE  LAW  OF   THE   SPIRIT  OF  LIFE       147 

spirit  of  God.  The  revelations  of  our  subconscious  self  are  all 
well  enough;  we  do  not  reject  them;  but  let  us  be  sure  they 
are  grounded  in  a  centre  worthy  of  our  highest  nature,  worthy 
not  only  of  what  we  are  but  of  what  our  hearts  beat  on  to  be. 
Thus  it  is;  if  ever,  that  the  unfolding  of  the  life  beyond  can 
become  clear,  and  authentic,  and  pure. 

But  transcendent  as  all  this  is,  it  begins,  it  pursues  its  whole 
course,  in  the  most  universal  relations  of  life.  What  other 
thing  is  there  that  fills  the  world  so  full,  after  all,  as  love? 
Viewed  in  this  supreme  manifestation  it  seems,  and  is,  a  trans- 
cendental thing,  so  high  that  we  faint  in  the  contemplation  of 
it.  But  does  not  a  new  world  open,  and  a  new  impulse  of  labor 
and  sacrifice,  to  every  young  man  and  every  young  woman, 
that  have  found,  out  of  all  the  world,  the  heart  to  which  his 
or  her  affections  may  be  married?  How  God  is  revealing  love 
all  the  while  in  the  family,  in  the  friend,  in  the  neighbor; 
how  it  expands  in  wisdom  and  strength  from  the  neighbor  — 
the  boor  that  is  nigh  —  the  tiller  of  the  soil  and  working  man 
whose  activities  lie  next  to  ours  —  onward  to  the  community, 
and  the  clan,  and  the  nation,  and  the  race;  yes,  onward,  in  a 
divine  momentum,  to  humanity  and  the  world  that  God  has 
made.  Why,  this  love  that  I  have  been  describing  is  just  the 
final  opening  of  the  gates,  so  that  what  began  with  lover  and 
lass,  father  and  son,  brother  and  sister,  still  narrow  and  rudi- 
mental  in  all,  though  genuine,  in  all,  is  an  unchecked  fountain 
for  all  the  world,  flowing  at  last  free  and  full,  and  consciously 
identified  with  the  spirit  of  the  universe.  The  race  of  man  is 
some  day  not  only  to  accept  and  acknowledge,  but  in  very 
truth  to  be  the  Christ,  the  Messiah  of  its  promise.  This  is 
what  the  law  of  the  spirit  of  life,  which  so  long  has  surged  up 
to  light  and  energy,  finally  amounts  to;  the  far  destiny  of  its 
evolutionary  uprise  lies  involved  in  it. 

Our  subject  has  now  become  so  broad,  and  the  radiations 
of  this  outward  current  are  so  many,  that  I  must  needs  exer- 
cise care  here  to  keep  rigorously  to  the  main  channel,  lest  we 
lose  ourselves  in  complexities.  You  may  know  then,  if  ques- 
tions rise,  that  I  am  postponing  many  things  here  calling  im- 


148  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

portunately  for  remark;  postponing  them  in  order  first  of  all 
to  get  the  one  dominating  line;  and  indeed  there  is  coming  a 
more  fitting  place  for  the  various  applications  to  life.  Mean- 
while, it  is  important  to  note  that  here  we  have  reached  the 
outer  bounds  of  the  world;  in  other  words,  the  love  by  which 
at  the  fulness  of  the  time  manhood  becomes  vitalized  is  a  love 
universal.  It  spreads  upwards,  downwards,  everywhere;  free 
and  pervasive  as  the  air;  its  only  sufficing  pattern  the  love  of 
God.  You  can  see  what  a  marvelous  chain  of  sequences  lead 
to  this;  can  see  it  in  the  simple  terms  of  his  growing  insight. 
There  has  risen  in  humanity  an  ideal  that  at  some  stage  of 
being  every  man,  his  individuality  complete  and  accountable, 
may  do  what  seems  good  to  him;  but  to  this  end  he  must  at- 
tain to  a  table-land  whereon  the  good  that  seems  shall  be  real 
and  absolute,  whereon  he  shall  see  things  as  they  are.  Now 
in  order  to  see  things  as  they  are,  he  must  love  them;  there  is 
no  other  way  to  enter  into  their  life,  with  its  motions  to  good, 
its  tendencies  to  evil.  Without  that  penetrative,  allowance- 
making  love,  he  stays  outside.  But  further,  I  am  speaking  of 
a  communion  which  can  only  be  with  beings  like-minded,  a 
communion  wherein  both  parties  can  enter  on  equal  terms; 
and  man's  equal  party,  his  likeness  and  image,  is  just  his 
fellow-man.  If  he  has  idealized  him  to  the  Son  of  man,  still 
He  is  the  brother-man,  wiser  and  holier,  and  so  Lord  of  man's 
will.  There  is  the  object  of  his  regard.  In  order  to  see  the 
good  in  his  fellow-man  he  must  love  his  fellow-man;  to  see  it 
in  the  ongoings  of  the  world,  he  must  love  the  mankind  that 
makes  up  the  world;  to  see  it  in  God,  still  his  way  is  to  love 
his  brother-man,  for  as  St.  John  says,  "He  that  loveth  not  his 
brother  whom  he  hath  seen,  how  can  he  love  God,  whom  he 
hath  not  seen?"  There  is  a  bit  of  common  sense  for  you.  St. 
John,  with  all  his  mysticism,  will  not  have  a  soul  straining  it- 
self to  get  the  rapturous  emotional  attitude  toward  God,  when 
all  the  while  his  heart  is  hard  toward  any  brother-man.  A 
man  that  does  that,  he  says,  and  professes  thus  to  love  God, 
is  a  liar.  All  this  reduces,  you  see,  to  a  free  play  of  love 
through  all  the  manhood  being;  it  has  the  pulsation  of  uni- 


THE  LAW  OF  THE  SPIRIT  OF  LIFE       149 

versality;  a  man  has  reached  the  plane  where  he  loves  his  kind 
not  because  his  kind  is  lovely,  or  because  his  love  would  wait 
for  and  depend  on  any  evoking  occasion,  but  just  because  it 
is  in  him  to  love.  Therefore  it  is  a  love  not  for  those  alone 
who  are  bound  by  ties  of  blood,  for  wife,  family,  comrade,  clan, 
race,  though  all  this  has  had  its  broadening  and  beneficent 
part  in  his  evolution;  it  is  a  love  also  for  enemies  and  perse- 
cutors, and  for  all  who  are  in  need  or  darkness,  whether  here 
or  across  the  seas.  "Who  is  my  mother?  and  who  are  my 
brethren?"  you  remember  our  Lord  once  asked.  "And  he 
stretched  forth  his  hand  toward  his  disciples,  and  said,  Be- 
hold my  mother  and  my  brethren!  For  whosoever  shall  do 
the  will  of  my  Father  which  is  in  heaven,  the  same  is 
my  brother,  and  sister,  and  mother."  Some  scoffers  have 
treated  this  remark  as  if  it  betrayed  a  strain  of  heartlessness 
in  Jesus,  and  especially  when  He  startled  men  by  a  half-truth 
utterance  of  the  same  principle,  saying  that  whoever  would 
come  after  Him  must  hate  his  father  and  mother  and  relatives 
and  forsake  all  he  had.  Why,  it  was  just  the  utterance  of  a 
heart  as  big  as  the  world,  His  translation  of  love  from  the 
terms  of  the  family  and  the  parish,  from  a  narrow  and  blood- 
bound  thing,  to  the  free  course  of  the  love  of  God,  love  uni- 
versal. A  simple  thing,  after  all,  though  so  large;  it  is  the 
emancipate  spirit  of  life,  which  we  may  express  in  the  words 
in  which  Lowell  described  the  character  of  Abraham  Lincoln: 

Fruitful  and  friendly  for  all  human  kind, 

Yet  also  nigh  to  heaven  and  loved  of  loftiest  stars. 

I  confess  there  is  no  other  revelation  of  Scripture  which  so  fills 
me  with  amazement,  is  so  manifestly  of  another  world,  as  this. 
It  almost  takes  one's  breath  away  to  reflect  how  fearlessly  and 
absolutely  this  intrinsic  love  in  man,  and  for  man,  is  identified 
with  the  far-withdrawn  life  of  God.  "God  is  love,"  says  St. 
John,  "and  he  that  dwelleth  in  love  dwelleth  in  God,  and  God 
in  him."  There  you  have  it;  no  theologian  in  the  world,  spec- 
ulating on  essences  and  attributes,  on  omniscience  and  omni- 
presence and  omnipotence  and  omni-what  you  please,  would 


150  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

dare  say  that  of  his  own  motion;  it  is  too  sublimely  simple. 
The  divine  is  so  revealed  in  that  supreme  human  trait,  the  per- 
fected capability  of  loving  without  bounds,  that  what  can  be 
predicated  of  the  one  is  unconditionally  predicated  of  the 
other. 

Here  is  the  essential  note  of  contrast  between  the  old  and 
the  new.  Under  an  empire  of  law  the  soul  looks  up  from  the 
under  side  of  things  to  a  Power  and  Wisdom  enthroned  above 
it,  and  stretching  out  so  vastly  beyond  man's  power  and  wis- 
dom that  he  cannot  emulate  them.  He  can  do  a  little  to  dis- 
cover and  use  them;  he  can  to  a  limited  extent  deflect  the 
forces  of  the  universe,  physical  and  moral,  to  his  own  purpose; 
but  for  the  most  part  his  role  is  one  of  simple  submission  to 
the  inevitable,  and  of  endeavor  to  make  the  best  of  it.  If  he  is 
a  slave,  he  looks  up  to  the  cosmic  burden  above  him  and  groans 
under  its  weight.  If  he  is  an  athlete,  who  accepts  and  master- 
fully wields  his  law  of  being,  he  still  looks  up  thankfully  to 
the  Source  of  law,  but  he  is  apt  also,  unless  a  finer  spirit  im- 
bues him,  to  look  down  on  his  weaker  fellow  and  despise  him; 
is  proud,  like  the  Pharisee,  because  he  can  work  his  law  better 
than  can  his  neighbor  the  publican.  In  the  empire  of  grace 
and  truth,  the  dominance  of  the  outward  current,  all  this  is 
changed.  It  is  no  more  looking  upward,  to  a  remote  and  alien 
Will  which  must  be  obeyed,  nor  looking  down  from  a  superior 
height  on  those  whose  works  are  less  meritorious  than  ours. 
Here,  you  see,  comes  in  St.  Paul's  distinction  about  the  grounds 
of  salvation:  "not  of  works,  lest  any  man  should  boast."  No: 
it  is  just  looking  straight  out  into  a  brother's  eyes,  and  making 
acquaintance  with  his  soul,  and  sharing  his  human  burden  and 
lot.  It  is  looking  straight  out,  too,  fearless  and  trustful,  into 
a  universe  vitalized  by  such  love.  Then  comes  the  amazing 
consciousness  that  in  this  attitude  of  love  he  is  sharing,  on 
equal  and  filial  terms,  in  the  central  life  of  God;  such  love 
being  the  motion  and  spirit  that  rolls  through  all  things.  On 
this  ground,  as  not  on  the  ground  of  power  and  wisdom,  he 
can  actually  emulate  God.  There  is  no  more  near  and  far,  no 
more  sense  that  the  universe  is  an  undiscovered  and  inacces- 


THE  LAW  OF   THE   SPIRIT  OF  LIFE       151 

sible  realm  beyond  him,  though  in  power  and  wisdom  he  still 
must  keep  to  his  insignificant  place;  here,  in  a  love  which  is 
fruitful  and  friendly  for  all,  he  is  dwelling,  as  at  home,  in  the 
secret  place  of  the  Most  High.  His  very  humility  but  accen- 
tuates his  essential  likeness  to  God;  it  is  "that  stoop  of  the 
soul  which  in  bending  upraises  it  too."  This  idea,  you  re- 
member, is  Browning's  favorite  theme;  he  has  laid  out  tre- 
mendous poetic  effort  on  the  expression  of  it.  In  his  poem  of 
Saul  it  reaches  its  most  glowing  height;  where  David,  after 
having  measured  himself,  in  sense  of  utter  insignificance, 
against  the  power  and  wisdom  of  the  universe,  goes  on  to  say: 

Yet  with  all  this  abounding  experience,  this  deity  known, 

I  shall  dare  to  discover  some  province,  some  gift  of  my  own. 

There's  a  faculty  pleasant  to  exercise,  hard  to  hoodwink, 

I  am  fain  to  keep  still  in  abeyance,  (I  laugh  as  I  think) 

Lest,  insisting  to  claim  and  parade  in  it,  wot  ye,  I  worst 

E'en  the  Giver  in  one  gift.  —  Behold,  I  could  love  if  I  durst! 

But  I  sink  the  pretension  as  fearing  a  man  may  o'ertake 

God's  own  speed  in  the  one  way  of  love:  I  abstain  for  love's  sake. 

Thus  the  power  to  love  rises  in  man's  heart  as  a  discovery, 
just  as  we  have  seen  it  rising;  as  a  discovery  of  that  in  which 
man  can  emulate  God.  Of  course  he  does  not  gloat  over  his 
new  discovery  long.  It  raises  the  question  whether,  after  all, 
he  is  so  far  beyond  the  Father  of  his  spirit: 

Do  I  find  love  so  full  in  my  nature,  God's  ultimate  gift, 

That  I  doubt  his  own  love  can  compete  with  it?    Here,  the  parts  shift? 

Here,  the  creature  surpass  the   Creator,  — the  end,  what  Began? 

Would  I  suffer  for  him  that  I  love  ?    So  wouldst  thou  —  so  wilt  thou ! 
So  shall  crown  thee  the  topmost,  ineffablest,  uttermost  crown  — 
And  thy  love  fill  infinitude  wholly,  nor  leave  up  or  down 
One  spot  for  the  creature  to  stand  in! 

So  his  discovery  of  love,  with  the  deduction  from  it,  becomes 
his  discovery  of  Christ,  who  after  all  is  his  own  nature,  per- 
fect and  ideal. 

This  is  the  summit  of  manhood,  as  it  comes  to  measure  its 
potencies  and  use  its  free  spirit  of  life.  As  thus  in  free  play 
these  potencies  are  too  great  for  an  earth-trained  human  na- 


152  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

ture;  but  in  fact  life  is  not  free  from  its  fetters  until  it  has 
reached  this  summit.  Every  point  short  of  this,  as  soon  as 
we  put  the  check  there,  leaves  life,  in  one  way  or  another,  as 
much  in  bondage  as  ever.  Over  against  each  halting-place  of 
love  rises  a  converse  of  hate  or  armed  neutrality;  suspicion 
and  distrust,  or  jealousy  and  contempt,  dark  evil  glances  over 
the  barrier;  while  the  love  that  is  prisoned  inside  is  no  more 
than  a  spiritual  compact  of  offense  and  defense.  So  instead 
of  making  this  marvelous  pulsation  of  love  a  hallowing  power 
to  make  us  love  all  men  better  for  loving  one,  every  bound  set 
makes  an  occasion  to  hate  or  ignore  all  outside  the  circle.  This 
is  not  grace  at  all,  but  only  a  refined  kind  of  business  partner- 
ship. Take  as  illustration  the  Jews,  whose  tremendous  dis- 
tinction it  is  to  have  been  the  national  vehicle  whereby  this 
salvation  by  grace  was  revealed.  Their  law  had  not  dried  up 
or  made  less  intense  their  capacity  of  love;  they  had  merely 
made  it  too  exclusive.  I  have  remarked  that  their  great  error 
was  to  have  stopped  at  the  race,  to  have  magnified  the  law  of 
the  species  to  that  point  and  then  committed  themselves  to  an 
arrested  development.  They  could  not  get  over  the  stumbling- 
block  of  Christ  crucified,  could  not  accept  the  ultimate  conse- 
quences of  a  free  play  of  universal  grace.  Yet  within  their 
bounds  their  love  of  race,  intense  and  pure,  furnishes  almost 
the  ideal  pattern  of  love.  Its  error  is  just  in  its  self-imposed 
barrier,  which  will  not  let  the  passion  burst  bonds  and  flow  out 
to  all  the  earth.  And  so  just  at  that  barrier-point  cluster  evils 
and  hatreds  as  intense  as  is  the  love  itself;  and  these  bring  on 
that  race  the  answering  hatred  and  distrust  of  the  world.  Like 
begets  like.  Here  is  how  Charles  Kingsley  makes  a  Jew  de- 
scribe his  race  as  it  was  in  the  fifth  Christian  century.  "Alas, 
my  lord,"  says  a  certain  Jew  secretary  to  the  prefect,  "y°u  do 
not  know  the  customs  of  that  accursed  folk.  They  have  a 
damnable  practice  of  treating  every  member  of  their  nation 
as  a  brother,  and  helping  each  freely  and  faithfully  without 
reward;  whereby  they  are  enabled  to  plunder  all  the  rest  of 
the  world,  and  thrive  themselves  from  the  least  to  the  greatest." 
Whether  that  is  a  fair  description  of  the  nation  to-day  I  leave 


THE  LAW  OF  THE  SPIRIT  OF  LIFE       153 

you  to  judge.  But  that  is  another  story.  The  Jewish  spirit, 
as  such,  with  its  undeniably  noble  traits,  may  not  be  aware 
what  ails  it;  but  some  day,  St.  Paul  says,  the  veil  will  be  taken 
from  their  hearts.  Well,  if  it  is,  look  out  for  the  avalanche 
of  human  love  which  will  mark  their  mission.  Nor  have  we, 
as  a  so-called  Christian  nation,  any  great  cause  to  boast.  Pa- 
triotism, love  of  country,  is  a  noble  thing;  but  set  the  limit  of 
love  there  and  the  nation  is  still  capable  of  rejoicing,  as  it  did 
a  few  years  ago,  over  the  success  of  a  tariff  which  takes  the 
bread  out  of  another  nation's  mouth.  I  need  not  extend  the 
illustration  to  the  prodigious  navies  and  armaments,  as  well 
as  the  finely  exacting  treaties,  which  one  and  all  are  the  huge 
symbol  of  national  distrust  and  fear;  I  need  not  speak  of  the 
churchly  love  which  splits  a  doctrine  between  north  and  north- 
east side  to  make  a  fence  round  it,  and  has  only  odium  theo- 
logicum  for  the  outsiders;  nor  of  the  rancors  and  jealousies  of 
private  life,  which  are  so  often  merely  the  reverse  side  of  a 
too  narrow,  too  restricted  love.  No:  I  give  you  the  exact  and 
rigorous  truth :  you  stay  the  course  and  radiation  of  love  at  any 
point  short  of  a  whole  humanity,  and  at  that  point  it  is  not 
love  at  all;  it  is  still  in  the  shackles  of  an  old  bondage  and  an 
old  fear. 

What  then  do  I  owe  to  my  fellow-man?  A  fair  question 
this,  echo  though  it  be  of  the  old  Cain  question,  "Am  I  my 
brother's  keeper?"  What  we  owe  to  men,  to  life,  to  the  world, 
is  just  our  duty,  what  is  due.  The  law  has  taught  us  that. 
And  St.  Paul,  speaking  for  the  adult  man,  and  making  the 
height  of  our  duty  correspond  to  the  grade  of  our  evolution, 
puts  the  whole  matter  into  one  short  utterance:  "Owe  no  man 
anything,  but  to  love  one  another."  That  is  the  whole  extent 
of  our  debt;  that  is  to  say,  we  owe  to  mankind  simply  all  that 
we  are.  It  is  the  tremendous  crowning-point  of  evolution,  as 
moulded  by  the  free  spirit,  that  man  has  it  in  him  to  do  that. 
Love  does  not  let  us  off  easily;  but  we  cannot  remonstrate;  it 
is  love's  own  chosen  way,  its  only  blessedness  lies  in  that  peren- 
nial obligation. 


154  rHE  LIFE  INDEED 

III.      THE    EVIDENCE    OF    THINGS    NOT    SEEN 

But  a  new  element  rises  to  view  here.  A  debt  so  imperative, 
a  self-sacrifice  so  absolute,  a  freedom  so  bound,  —  who  shall 
lay  it  upon  us  as  a  duty?  Through  all  those  centuries  of  edu- 
cation in  godlikeness  men  have  learned  to  receive  mercy  and 
forgiveness,  and  the  consciousness  of  that  grace  from  the  un- 
seen places  has  made  two  results  possible:  either  to  make  that 
immunity  an  occasion  for  carelessness,  not  to  say  transgres- 
sion, or  to  make  the  law  itself  all  the  more  holy  and  just  and 
good.  So  it  is  that  every  advance  in  insight  has  its  obverse  and 
reverse  sides,  according  as  it  is  or  is  not  accepted  in  the  spirit 
of  it.  But  when  it  comes  to  showing  that  same  mercy  and  for- 
giveness, and  embodying  it  in  loving  character,  and  when  this 
is  put  before  man  as  a  debt  that  he  owes,  as  a  thing  that  as 
true  man  he  must  do,  immediately  Shylock's  question  rises  to 
rebel,  — 

On  what  compulsion  must  I?  tell  me  that. 

And  the  same  answer  meets  it: 

The  quality  of  mercy  is  not  strain 'd; 
It  droppeth  as  the  gentle  rain  from  heaven 
Upon  the  place  beneath  it:  it  is  twice  blest; 
It   blesseth    him    that   gives,    and   him    that    takes. 

But  to  secure  the  blessing  of  him  that  gives;  in  other  words, 
to  commit  ourselves  freely  and  without  reservation  to  this  new 
law  of  the  spirit  of  life;  this  is  the  new  problem  that  rises  to 
view  here,  the  last  and  crucial  barrier  to  surmount.  For  we 
have  reached  the  point  where  we  can  see  over  into  the  new  life, 
can  see  its  glory  and  its  beauty;  and  we  are  aware  that  we  have 
been  lifelong  recipients  of  just  such  grace  and  forgiveness;  but 
to  launch  forth  on  it,  as  on  a  returnless  ocean,  and  to  make 
it  the  rule  of  living,  —  who  is  sufficient  for  that?  Until  there 
is  actual  committal  of  the  will  to  it,  the  heart  of  man  is  still 
merely  looking  through  the  gates  of  his  prison,  merely  con- 
templating the  sunshine  beyond.  The  untasted  cup  is  at  his 
lips. 

He  saith,  "It  is  good";  still  he  drinks  not:   he  lets  me  praise  life, 
Gives  assent,  yet  would  die  for  his  own  part. 


THE  LAW  OF  THE  SPIRIT  OF  LIFE       155 

And  so,  high  as  we  have  come,  dazzled  as  we  are  with  the  glory 
of  it,  still  we  must  ask,  as  Browning  asked  of  Saul,  - 

What  was  gone,  what  remained?  All  to  traverse,  'twixt  hope  and  despair; 
Death  was  past,  life  not  come. 

This  committal  to  the  new  spirit  of  life,  here  so  absolute  a 
requisite,  is  what  we  call  faith;  and  this  faith,  in  its  essence,  is 
the  evidence,  or  as  some  translate  it,  the  testing,  of  things  not 
seen.  It  is,  in  the  evolutionary  dialect  we  have  chosen,  that 
supreme  effort  of  the  spirit  of  man  by  which  he  enters  the 
majestic  outward  current  of  the  universe,  so  as  thenceforth 
to  be  consciously  and  willingly  identified  with  it.  Whether 
God  or  he  has  more  part  is  an  idle  question;  our  concern  is 
with  the  committal  which  constitutes  his  part.  Until  this  is 
made,  the  whole  new  life  remains  merely  a  proffer,  not  a  gift; 
and  so  a  thing  not  understood  at  all,  for  it  cannot  be  under- 
stood except  by  living  it.  This,  you  see,  is  only  another  way 
of  saying,  "Except  a  man  be  born  again,  he  cannot  see  the 
kingdom  of  God."  Faith  is  the  human  initiative,  as  it  makes 
the  vital  venture  and  enters  the  kingdom. 

A  man  cannot  make  this  committal  by  being  told  to  make 
it.  It  is  wholly  beyond  any  law  that  can  be  laid  upon  him, 
anything  that  can  be  commanded.  It  must  be  a  free  motion 
on  his  own  part,  his  own  surrender,  his  own  will.  And  yet, 
we  do  not  know  how,  a  strange  other  half  comes  to  meet  his 
act,  and  as  soon  as  it  comes  he  feels,  he  knows,  that  that  other 
and  unseen  half  is  really  the  vital  whole,  and  his  half  is 
nothing.  Have  you  ever  waked  up  in  the  night  unable  to 
stir,  —  as  if  somehow  the  wheels  of  your  being  were  caught 
at  a  dead  centre;  — unable  to  make  the  slightest  movement 
hand  or  foot,  unable  to  cry  out  for  help,  every  function  but 
breathing  at  a  dead  syncope?  You  know  how  awful  is  the 
sense  of  this  stoppage  of  the  vital  motions,  though  it  be  en- 
tirely without  pain.  And  yet,  the  instant  you  succeed  in 
making  the  smallest  movement,  hardly  a  movement  at  all, 
everything  is  right  again,  the  currents  of  life  resume  their 
normal  flow.  Well,  it  has  always  seemed  to  me  as  if,  on  its 


156  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

larger  scale,  the  personal  venture  of  faith  were  IIKC  that.  One 
moment  the  being,  though  all  ready  to  live,  is  at  a  deadlock 
and  standstill;  the  next  moment  it  is  launched  in  the  free  cur- 
rent of  the  new  life,  with  functions  in  full  play,  as  if  it  were 
born  so.  It  is  like  that  man  to  whom  our  Lord  said,  "Stretch 
forth  thy  hand."  What  a  command  this,  to  one  whose  arm 
had  been  withered  and  inert  for  years,  perhaps  from  birth,  an 
atrophied  member.  And  yet  —  somehow  the  effort  was  made, 
and  the  ruddy  current  of  life  came  coursing  down,  and  the 
man  was  made  whole.  It  was,  so  far  forth,  the  birth  of  a  spirit, 
a  will,  and  new  vitality  was  the  answer  to  it. 

How  much  this  committal  of  faith  means,  morally  and  prac- 
tically, we  can  realize  better  by  comparing  its  bold  reckless- 
ness, as  a  virtue,  with  the  self-contained  and  thrifty  virtues  of 
paganism  and  legalism.  You  remember  I  quoted  from  Ches- 
terton the  remark  that  Christianity  had  adopted  the  old  pagan 
virtues,  like  justice  and  temperance,  but  had  invented  three 
wholly  new  ones,  faith,  hope,  and  charity,  the  so-called  vir- 
tues of  grace.  He  goes  on  then  to  contrast  these  new  virtues 
with  the  old.  Not  stopping  here  to  dwell  on  his  first  element 
of  contrast,  namely  that,  while  the  old  are  the  sad  virtues, 
these  new  are  "the  gay  and  exuberant  virtues,"  we  note  that 
"the  second  evident  fact,  which  is  even  more  evident,  is  the 
fact  that  the  pagan  virtues  are  the  reasonable  virtues,  and 
that  the  Christian  virtues  of  faith,  hope,  and  charity  are  in 
their  essence  as  unreasonable  as  they  can  be."  His  exposition 
of  this  remark,  though  it  strains  the  paradox  a  little,  will  bear 
thought.  He  shows  first  how  eminently  reasonable  and  self- 
justifying  the  pagan  virtues  are.  "Justice,"  he  says,  "consists 
in  finding  out  a  certain  thing  due  to  a  certain  man  and  giving 
it  to  him.  Temperance  consists  in  finding  out  the  proper  limit 
of  a  particular  indulgence  and  adhering  to  that.  But,"  he 
goes  on  to  say,  "charity  means  pardoning  what  is  unpardon- 
able, or  it  is  no  virtue  at  all.  Hope  means  hoping  when  things 
are  hopeless,  or  it  is  no  virtue  at  all.  And  faith  means  believ- 
ing the  incredible,  or  it  is  no  virtue  at  all."  This  is  his  violent 
way  of  saying,  what  is  essentially  true,  that  these  new  virtues, 


THE  LAW  OF   THE   SPIRIT  OF  LIFE       157 

reversing  the  whole  current  of  character  from  inward-flowing 
to  outward,  are  just  as  unreasonable  as  they  can  be,  and  do 
their  work  of  regenerating  the  decrepit  old  world  by  their  very 
unreasonableness. 

Before  we  go  on  to  complete  the  application  of  this  to  our 
subject,  it  is  worth  while  to  quote  Mr.  Chesterton  a  little 
further,  as  especially  relating  to  the  greatest  of  these,  charity, 
or  love.  "It  is  true,"  he  says,  "that  there  is  a  thing  crudely 
called  charity,  which  means  charity  to  the  deserving  poor; 
but  charity  to  the  deserving  is  not  charity  at  all,  but  justice. 
It  is  the  undeserving  who  require  it,  and  the  ideal  either  does 
not  exist  at  all,  or  exists  wholly  for  them."  Then  later  he 
sums  up  the  general  atmosphere,  so  to  say,  of  the  world  pagan 
and  the  world  Christian.  "The  beautiful  and  astonishing 
pagan  world,"  he  says,  " .  .  .  was  a  world  in  which  common 
sense  was  really  common;"  while  of  the  virtues  which  irradiate 
a  Christian  world  he  says:  "They  are  all  three  paradoxical, 
they  are  all  three  practical,  and  they  are  all  three  paradoxical 
because  they  are  practical.  It  is  the  stress  of  ultimate  need, 
and  a  terrible  knowledge  of  things  as  they  are,  which  led  men 
to  set  up  these  riddles,  and  to  die  for  them.  Whatever  may  be 
the  meaning  of  the  contradiction,  it  is  the  fact  that  the  only 
kind  of  hope  that  is  of  any  use  in  a  battle  is  a  hope  that  denies 
arithmetic.  Whatever  may  be  the  meaning  of  the  contradic- 
tion, it  is  the  fact  that  the  only  kind  of  charity  which  any 
weak  spirit  wants,  or  which  any  generous  spirit  feels,  is  the 
charity  which  forgives  the  sins  that  are  like  scarlet.  Whatever 
may  be  the  meaning  of  faith,  it  must  always  mean  a  certainty 
about  something  we  cannot  prove.  Thus,  for  instance,  we  be- 
lieve by  faith  in  the  existence  of  other  people." 

This  last  sentence  is  not  so  much  of  an  anticlimax  as  it 
sounds.  To  have  faith  in  the  existence  of  other  people,  with 
all  their  individual  worlds  of  hopes  and  fears,  handicaps  and 
errors,  is  really  the  final  application  of  faith  to  practice.  Let 
us  leave  the  ordinary  notion  of  faith,  that  it  is  assent  to  a 
creed;  it  may  include  that,  but  it  is  a  great  deal  more,  and 
its  central  essence  is  something  quite  other.  To  say  that  by 


158  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

faith  you  commit  your  whole  being  to  an  ideal  is  to  say  that 
you  live  as  if  a  certain  thing  were  true,  conforming  all  your 
acts  to  that  idea,  and  yet  the  thing  to  which  you  thus  relate 
yourself  does  not  yet  exist,  or  if  it  does  you  cannot  prove  it, 
do  not  try  to  prove  it;  rather  your  faith  virtually  creates  it, 
as  an  object  to  live  for.  Your  faith  is  thus  a  kind  of  excess, 
an  exuberance  of  being;  you  take  that  attitude  when  there  is 
no  reason  in  things  or  in  men  for  you  to  act  so;  nay,  the  atti- 
tude may  be  absurd  or  dangerous  from  a  reasonable  point  of 
view;  and  yet  you  act  so  because  it  is  in  you  to  act  so,  it  is  the 
spirit,  the  initiative,  of  your  being  so  to  do.  This,  you  see,  is 
just  that  overflow  or  surplusage  of  life  that  we  have  spoken  of. 
It  is  the  vitality  that  comes  into  a  man  when  his  ideal  of  things 
has  laid  hold  of  his  will;  Professor  James  speaks  of  it 
as  "the  will  to  believe";  though  it  is  not  so  much  the  will 
to  have  faith  as  it  is  the  will  which  is  itself  faith  at  work.  It 
is  something  like  the  youthful  spirit  of  adventure  for  the  ad- 
venture's sake;  only,  with  all  the  abandon  of  that,  it  sees  an 
unseeable  good  beyond  the  adventure.  It  is  like  —  nay  it  is, 
the  leap  from  realism,  which  sees  only  a  sordid  and  crooked 
and  toil-enslaved  world  such  as  Koheleth  and  the  realists  in 
general  see,  to  idealism,  to  romance  if  you  please,  which 
creates  a  world  more  delightful,  more  righteous,  more  coura- 
geous, more  capable  of  love,  than  actually  exists,  and  which 
then  casts  the  whole  weight  of  its  being  into  that  scale.  You 
can  think  how  much  this  means.  Why,  it  is  as  much  as  life 
is  worth  to  have  such  faith  as  this.  And  it  is  large,  it  makes 
us  large,  just  according  to  our  ideal  of  the  sum  of  things,  ac- 
cording to  the  mighty  horizon  in  whose  bounds  we  move. 

Now  the  reason  why  we  cannot  let  faith  stop  with  mere 
assent  to  a  creed  is  because  it  is  not  mere  passive  surrender 
alone;  it  is  an  act,  or  rather  a  habitude  of  action;  the  very 
highest  act  of  the  spirit  of  man,  its  act  when  the  spirit  of  God 
bears  witness  with  it;  it  is  in  fact  this  life  indeed  in  action. 
We  speak  of  things  at  rest  and  things  in  motion;  we  contem- 
plate them,  as  the  phrase  is,  both  statically  and  dynamically. 
Well,  we  have  seen  the  statics  of  the  new  life:  love  to  fellow- 


THE  LAW  OF   THE   SPIRIT  OF  LIFE       159 

man,  taking  its  pattern  from  the  pervasive  love  of  God.  Here 
in  faith  we  have  the  dynamics  of  it:  that  same  love  tingling 
and  quivering  with  energy,  committing  itself  to  a  work  in  the 
world,  to  a  creative  contact  with  man  as  man,  and  daring  to 
ensue  the  consequences.  That  is,  it  is  faith  in  human  nature; 
it  is  freely  venturing  to  commit  itself  to  human  nature  as  it 
is,  in  that  overflow  of  self-forgetting  love;  or  as  St.  Paul  says, 
it  "beareth  all  things,  believeth  all  things,  hopeth  all  things, 
endureth  all  things."  This,  not  because  all  things  are  there 
to  believe  in,  —  or  rather  to  know,  because  if  they  were  there 
you  would  know  it,  and  not  have  to  believe  it  at  all,  —  but 
precisely  because  they  are  not  there,  and  the  faith  would  create 
them  there.  And  this  faith  in  human  nature,  as  the  mighty 
power  of  Christian  love  is  with  us  to  testify,  is  the  greatest 
creative  agency  in  the  world.  Without  it,  to  call  men  out  of 
their  prison  of  worldliness,  and  out  of  the  baseness  in  which 
they  wallow,  where  would  mankind  be?  Why,  this  faith  in 
human  nature,  which  brings  love  to  men  and  gives  them  a 
chance  to  rise,  is  just  what  we  have  laughed  at  as  an  absurd 
and  unreal  thing,  and  the  crude  view  of  which  has  split  de- 
nominations asunder,  —  what  we  call  imputed  righteousness. 
Imputed  righteousness  is  just  giving  man  a  chance;  the  same 
as  you  give  a  drunkard  who  desires  to  reform  all  the  help  and 
encouragement  in  the  world  until  he  has  reformed  in  actual 
fact.  When  he  signs  the  pledge  he  is  not  a  temperate  man; 
he  is  the  same  old  sot,  with  his  raging  appetite  still  pulling  at 
his  vitals;  but  you  treat  him  as  if  he  were  a  temperate  man, 
you  open  to  him  all  the  freedom  and  privileges  of  the  world 
of  temperance  into  which  you  are  introducing  him;  you  accord 
him  these  though  you  know  he  will  stumble  and  fall;  you  would 
be  heartless  and  inhuman  not  to  do  so.  Well,  what  is  that? 
Imputed  temperance,  nothing  less,  nothing  else.  You  impute 
to  him  the  virtue  that  is  possible,  until  he  has  made  it  real. 
Just  so  it  is  with  all  the  virtues,  all  the  potencies,  of  humanity. 
By  your  faith  in  human  nature  you  treat  them  as  if  they  were 
righteous  when  they  are  not  righteous;  you  love  them  into 
righteousness;  you  give  them  by  imputation  all  the  benefits 


160  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

of  the  completed  virtue,  until  they  have  made  the  imputed 
virtue  real.  What  else  can  you  do,  if  you  love  men  at  all? 

But  you  say  faith  is  faith  in  God;  you  are  afraid  I  will 
leave  out  the  divine  element.  Don't  be  afraid;  the  divine  ele- 
ment is  all  the  while  working  with  the  human;  it  is  the  divine 
indeed  that  from  its  unseen  depth  is  all  the  while  taking  the 
initiative.  Your  faith  in  human  nature  is  faith  in  the  God  on 
whom  human  nature  is  to  lay  hold  for  salvation,  just  as  you 
have  already  laid  hold  of  that  spirit  which  is  in  you  to  will 
and  to  do;  your  own  faith  is  the  laying  hold  of  that  unseen 
power,  and  by  it  you  are  new-born  into  that  kingdom  where 
He  works  and  reigns.  Not  to  have  faith  in  Him  is  not  to  be- 
lieve, not  to  take  for  granted,  that  He  can  manage  the  world 
that  He  is  evolving  and  bring  it  to  its  goal.  Faith  in  God? 
Why,  God's  court,  God's  believed  nature,  is  just  the  clearing- 
house of  all  our  ideas  of  effective  work  in  the  world.  That 
nature  of  God,  walked  in  as  if  known,  lived  in  as  the  only  solu- 
tion of  life,  is  our  constant  base  of  supplies.  Here  is  where,  by 
contrast,  the  deadly  blight  of  agnosticism  appears.  To  live 
as  if  the  source  and  impulse  of  your  evolution  could  not  be 
known  is  to  cling  to  the  bondage,  the  inertia,  the  paganism, 
the  death,  of  realism;  you  are  condemned  thereby  to  treat  the 
world  as  it  is,  and  to  get  out  all  your  ideals  by  experiment,  by 
the  rule  of  thumb,  having  no  clearing-house  of  love  and  high 
standards  to  measure  by.  Think  how  much  more  it  means 
when,  having  by  the  sublime  uprise  of  faith  risen  out  of  ag- 
nosticism, you  hold  it  true,  and  live  as  if  it  were  true,  that 
God  is  love,  and  he  that  dwelleth  in  love  dwelleth  in  God,  and 
God  in  him.  Now  you  have  the  principle  by  which  to  make 
your  ideal  no  more  a  rule  of  thumb,  a  thing  groped  after  and 
always  doubted,  but  real  and  feasible,  and  known  by  its 
mighty  works. 

But  your  faith  in  God,  your  primal  reference,  so  to  say,  to 
your  clearing-house  of  ideal,  translates  itself  in  its  final  appli- 
cation to  faith  in  your  brother-man.  It  becomes  a  kind  of 
spirit  of  adventure  in  which  you  go  forth  to  make  man  from 
what  he  is  to  what  he  ought  to  be.  In  so  doing  you  must 


THE  LAW  OF  THE  SPIRIT  OF  LIFE       161 

reckon  with  all  his  unto  war  dness,  all  his  baseness,  all  his  depths 
of  degradation;  and  your  knowledge  or  agnosticism  is  not 
sufficient  to  this;  it  must  be  a  reckless  launching  forth  on  the 
shoreless  ocean  of  faith,  must  be  an  overflow  of  your  own  life 
beyond  reasonable  bounds.  As  Chesterton  says,  it  is,  in  its 
very  essence,  just  as  unreasonable  as  it  can  be.  But  it,  and 
it  alone,  has  that  other  mark  of  full  life  that  he  mentioned: 
it  is  full  of  joy,  abandon,  gaiety,  exuberance.  As  a  virtue  of 
grace  it  contrasts  itself  with  the  sad  virtues  of  paganism,  or 
the  painful  obedience  of  that  empire  of  law  wherein,  as  St. 
Paul  says,  men  were  "shut  up  unto  the  faith  which  should 
afterwards  be  revealed."  Joy  is  the  note  of  the  full  tide  of 
being,  wherein  all  the  functions  of  life  are  in  free  play,  making 
music  together.  What  a  misapprehension  it  is  under  which 
men  labor,  that  the  Christian  life  of  love  is  a  solemn,  sancti- 
monious, morose,  despairing  thing!  Do  you  know  that  even 
so  great  a  man  as  Edmund  Clarence  Stedman  has  so  mistaken 
the  reality  of  things  as  to  say  that  that  picture  of  Diirer's,  his 
"Melancholia,"  represents  the  Genius  of  Christianity!  Why, 
this  full  tide  of  faith,  wreaking  its  energies  on  the  needs  of 
the  world,  is  the  joyfulest  thing,  the  sanest,  most  enthusiastic 
thing  in  the  world.  Stedman  wrote  while  our  age  was  still 
under  the  morbid  influence  of  a  half -faith;  you  recall  the 
period  well;  when,  with  Tennyson  and  Matthew  Arnold  and 
their  school,  men  were  trying  to  have  faith  in  God,  and  moon- 
ing and  mourning  over  the  seeming  malignities  that  they  found 
in  Nature.  It  was  a  kind  of  dead-lift  of  faith,  trying  to  pull 
itself  up  by  the  boot-straps,  and  it  found  expression,  or  tried 
to,  in  the  contemplation  of  those  sad  seers 

Who  trusted  God  was  love  indeed 

And   love   Creation's  final  law  — 

Tho'  Nature,  red  in  tooth  and  claw 
With    ravine,    shriek'd    against    his    creed. 

That  was  only  a  half-faith,  —  afraid  God  wouldn't,  or  couldn't, 
do  his  part;  it  assumed  that  if  only  God  would  manage  things 
right,  humanity  could  do  the  rest.  But  the  real  progress  of 
things  is  to  get  out  of  this  half-faith;  to  trust  in  your  clearing- 


162  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

house,  your  base  of  supplies,  taking  for  granted  that  God  has 
as  large  an  ideal  at  heart  as  we  have,  —  and  then  live  up  to 
it.  The  only  way  to  live  up  to  it  is  to  be  yourselj  love  indeed, 
and  then  you  are  contributing  your  part  to  make  love  cre- 
ation's final  law.  And  just  as  soon  as  you  do  that,  applying 
that  love  in  the  freedom  of  the  spirit  to  your  neighbor  at  your 
side,  your  doubt  and  sadness  melt  into  an  exuberant,  adven- 
turous joy.  Your  life  becomes  genial,  rays  out  to  meet  and 
illumine  all  other  life.  You  don't  have  to  strain  and  struggle 
to  live,  or  figure  on  how  to  get  up  the  proper  emotional  state 
for  happiness,  you  live  by  radiating  life.  Chesterton  describes 
one  of  the  well-known  men  of  this  age  in  these  words:  "He 
was  one  of  those  people  who  live  up  to  their  emotional  incomes, 
who  are  always  taut  and  tingling  with  vanity.  Hence  he  had 
no  strength  to  spare;  hence  he  had  no  kindness,  no  geniality; 
for  geniality  is  almost  definable  as  strength  to  spare.  He  had 
no  god-like  carelessness;  he  never  forgot  himself;  his  whole 
life  was,  to  use  his  own  expression,  an  arrangement.  He  went 
in  for  'the  art  of  living'  —  a  miserable  trick."  Geniality - 
strength  to  spare  —  the  god-like  carelessness  which  forgets 
self  —  these  are  marks  of  that  adventurous  life  which  has 
committed  itself  to  faith  in  human  nature.  And  its  alternative 
is,  either  vanity,  all  shut  up  in  the  contemplation  of  one's  own 
cleverness  and  cultivating  the  art  of  living,  or  else  the  morbid 
inertia  of  that  half-faith  which  cannot  take  God's  gracious 
love  as  a  thing  to  be  known,  and  exulted  in,  and  poured  out  in 
good  deeds  on  the  world. 

Such  faith  in  human  nature  is  no  weakling  virtue.  I  am 
not  prophesying  to  you  smooth  things,  or  idle  emotions  of 
sweet  belief;  am  not  opening  the  vision  of  a  life  that  drifts 
lazily  down  the  stream  of  years  with  no  hand  on  oar  or  rudder. 
No:  with  all  its  strain  of  purest  joy,  the  only  true  joy  of  living, 
such  life  of  faith,  which  can  love  enemies  and  suffer  injustice 
and  dare  to  turn  the  other  cheek,  connotes  the  highest  courage. 
It  requires  pluck,  stamina,  to  love  your  fellow-man  through 
thick  and  thin,  to  keep  that  love  in  you  burning  brightly  and 
without  flicker  of  inconsistency  or  abatement;  it  is  as  much 


THE  LAW  OF   THE   SPIRIT  OF  LIFE       163 

as  life  is  worth.  "God  hath  not  given  us,"  as  St.  Paul  says, 
"the  spirit  of  cowardice,  but  of  power,  and  of  love,  and  of 
sanity  —  a  sound  mind." 

We  need  to  keep  constantly  in  mind  our  base  of  operations, 
and  so  I  must  have  you  note  again  that  this  life  I  am  portray- 
ing —  this  life  of  universal  love,  universal  faith,  universal  hope 
-  is  life  on  the  larger  scale,  on  a  scale  as  large  as  the  largest 
it  can  ever  be  in  us  to  be.  It  is  just  the  life  of  the  spirit,  of 
the  outward  current,  wherein  we  magnificently  dare  to  take 
the  initiative  and  wreak  ourselves  "soul-forward,  headlong" 
on  the  world  as  we  see  it,  or  rather  as  we  see  what  is  ideally  in 
our  manhood.  But  this  larger  scale  magnifies  everything  in 
proportion,  and  the  depths  that  are  possible  are  correspond- 
ingly just  as  great  as  are  the  possible  heights.  We  have  be- 
come, so  to  say,  original;  and  both  original  sin  and  original 
righteousness  partake  in  this  enlargement  of  relation.  I  am 
using  the  word  original,  you  see,  not  in  its  mystic  theological 
sense  but  in  the  sense  which  we  give  it  in  everyday  parlance. 
We  have  reached  the  point  where  it  is  our  adult  function  to 
have  about  us  something  individual  and  original;  not  neces- 
sarily that  we  do  differently  from  everybody  else,  but  that  we 
do  it  of  our  own  motion.  So  far  forth,  as  St.  Paul  says,  we 
are  dead  to  law,  that  is,  to  doing  things  merely  because  some 
external  will  has  imposed  it  upon  us.  And  so  our  original  sin, 
if  we  are  foolish  enough  to  incur  it,  is  really  originative;  not 
a  fated  thing  to  which  we  are  born,  whether  we  will  it  or  not, 
nor  a  blind  stupid  pitfall  into  which  we  tumble  heels  over 
head,  and  then  either  curse  or  pity  ourselves  because  we  find 
ourselves  caught,  but  what  is  called  a  "sin  against  light,"  a 
sin  in  which  we  know  what  we  are  about,  and  deliberately 
choose  it,  and  in  which  our  new-born  power  and  love  and  sound 
mind  are  all  outraged.  In  like  manner  our  righteousness  has 
become  individual  and  originative,  artistic  so  to  say;  it  takes 
the  color  and  thrust  of  our  personality;  not  a  thing  which  the 
givers  of  the  law,  or  the  officers  of  the  church,  wound  up  and 
set  going,  to  run  thenceforth  of  itself,  but  a  thing  again  in 
which  our  new-born  power  and  love  and  sound  mind  have  free 


164  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

and  fearless  course.  There  is  the  note  of  originality  about 
them  both;  and  this  is  what  makes  them  great  and  manlike. 
The  adult  man  ought  to  count  it  shame  to  be  like  a  jelly-fish, 
which  environment  and  heredity  can  mux  all  up  and  tread  into 
shapelessness,  or  a  chameleon,  which  takes  any  color  that  will 
keep  it  out  of  danger;  he  belongs  to  the  higher  species  which 
has  a  backbone  and  an  emancipated  will,  and  which  to  any 
alien  action  against  it  can  oppose  the  overcoming  reaction  of 
individual  judgment  and  wisdom. 

You  remember  how  Kipling  has  set  forth  this  need  of  origi- 
nality in  life,  by  contrast,  in  his  striking  poem  entitled  "Tom- 
linson."  He  has  done  it  so  brutally  as  to  make  it  sound  coarse, 
but  this  is  merely  his  way  of  hitting  the  nail  on  the  head  with 
such  a  resounding  blow  that  the  reader's  attention  must  re- 
spond; and  we  can  take  whatever  truth  it  has  without  the  bru- 
tality. Tomlinson  of  Berkeley  Square,  you  know,  gave  up 
the  ghost  and  went  to  his  eternal  account.  He  had  always 
lived  a  conventional  parasitic  sort  of  life,  depending  on  others 
and  taking  the  passive  color  of  circumstances;  but  now  he 
found  that  in  order  to  balance  his  books  he  must  answer  some 
searching  questions. 

"Stand  up,  stand  up  now,  Tomlinson,  and  answer  loud  and  high 
The  good  that  ye  did  for  the  sake  of  men  or  ever  ye  came  to  die  — 
The  good  that  ye  did  for  the  sake  of  men  in  little  earth  so  lone!" 

At  which  his  naked  soul  grew  white  with  terror: 

i 

"O  I  have  a  friend  on  earth,"  he  said,  "that  was  my  priest  and  guide, 
And  well  would  he  answer  all  for  me  if  he  were  by  my  side." 

But  to  this  he  only  got  the  response  that  Ezekiel  long  ago  an- 
ticipated, that  this  was  not  a  partnership  but  an  individual 
matter,  — 

"For  the  race  is  run  by  one  and  one  and  never  by  two  and  two." 

Then  he  could  only  look  vainly  up  and  down,  and  falter  out: 

"O  this  I  have  read  in  a  book,"  he  said,  "and  that  was  told  to  me, 

And  this  I  have  thought  that  another  man  thought  of  a  Prince  in  Muscovy." 


THE  LAW  OF   THE   SPIRIT  OF  LIFE       165 

But  this  would  not  go  either,  and  as  inexorable  destiny  gripped 
him  closer,  he  could  look  back  and  forth  and  whimper, 

"O  this  I  have  felt,  and  this  I  have  guessed,  and  this  I  have  heard  men  say, 
And  this  they  wrote  that  another  man  wrote  of  a  carl  in  Norroway." 

But  the  stern  answer  to  all  this  paltering  was, 

"O  none  may  reach  by  hired  speech  of  neighbour,  priest,  and  kin 
Through  borrowed  deed  to  God's  good  meed  that  lies  so  fair  within; 
Get  hence,  get  hence  to  the  Lord  of  Wrong,  for  doom  has  yet  to  run, 
And  ...  the    faith    that    ye    share    with    Berkeley     Square    uphold    you, 
Tomlinson !" 

Then  they  took  him  to  the  other  place,  where  sat  as  stoker 
and  judge  the  Satan  who,  whatever  his  abysmal  evils,  had  from 
the  first  character  enough  to  have  striven  with  God  and  taken 
the  consequences;  and  here  the  other  side  of  the  account  was 
opened. 

"Sit  down,  sit  down  upon  the  slag,  and  answer  loud  and  high 
The  harm  that  ye  did  to  the  Sons  of  Men  or  ever  you  came  to  die." 

Yes,  he  could  think  of  a  foul  fleshly  wrong  he  had  done;  but, 
falling  back  on  Adam's  excuse,  he  said  it  was  not  he,  it  was 
the  woman  who  tempted  him;  and  to  this  came  the  same  ob- 
jection as  to  his  borrowed  good  deed: 

"For  the  race  is  run  by  one  and  one  and  never  by  two  and  two." 

Then,  as  he  went  on  to  rake  up  what  he  had  heard,  and  what 
was  noised  abroad,  and  what  he  had  got  out  of  French  books, 
only  to  be  met  by  the  peremptory  demand, 

"Have  ye  sinned   one   sin   for  the   pride   o'   the   eye   or  the   sinful  lust   of 
the  flesh?" 

he  managed  to  recall  one  deadly  sin ;  whereat  Satan  — 

"Did  ye  read  of  that  sin  in  a  book?"  said  he;  and  Tomlinson  said,  "Ay!" 

In  utter  contempt  Satan  gave  him  over  to  his  tricksey  crew 
to  awinnow  him  out,"  as  he  said;  and  they  did  it  with  unction; 

And  back  they  came  with  the  tattered  Thing,  as  children  after  play, 

And  they  said:  "The  soul  that  he  got  from  God  he  has  bartered  clean  away. 

We  have  threshed  a  stock  of  print  and  book,  and  winnowed  a  chattering  wind 

And  many  a  soul  wherefrom  he  stole,  but  his  we  cannot  find: 

We  have  handled  him,  we  have  dandled  him,  we  have  seared  him  to  the  bone, 

And  sure  if  tooth  and  nail  show  truth  he  has  no  soul  of  his  own." 


i66  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

So  finally  he  is  sent  back  to  earth  again,  fit  neither  for  heaven 
nor  hell;  sent  back  to  carry  a  sturdier  word,  the  word  of  man- 
hood initiative  and  individuality,  to  the  Sons  of  Men.  It  is 
Kipling's  strong  and  brutal  version  of  Browning's  similar  idea 
of  the  awful  court  of  judgment  and  award, 

that  sad  obscure  sequestered  state 
Where   God  unmakes  but  to   remake  the  soul 
He  else  made  first  in  vain. 

I  keep  drawing,  as  you  see,  upon  the  poetry  and  fiction  of 
our  day,  the  literature  that  we  all  have  in  our  libraries;  and 
this  I  do  advisedly,  because,  when  we  read  it  with  the  key  in 
.mind,  it  is  alive  with  flashes  of  the  truth  absolute,  which  piece 
by  piece  God  is  all  the  while  revealing  to  men.  But  the  Bible 
also,  whose  central  theme  we  are  tracing,  is  a  literature;  it, 
like  our  modern  literature,  is  the  majestic  stream  of  story  and 
poetry  and  parable  by  which  men  like  us  have  put  into  words 
the  law  of  the  spirit  of  life  as  it  came  to  light.  One  main 
difference  between  it  and  our  literature  is,  that  in  its  large  out- 
come it  always  holds  the  balance  true;  while  in  modern  litera- 
ture it  is  hard  to  find  a  mind,  however  gifted,  who  does  not 
err  by  excess  on  one  side  or  the  other.  Here,  for  instance,  our 
truculent  friend  Kipling  has  so  violently  emphasized  the  ele- 
ment of  individuality  that  it  seems  to  fill  the  whole  horizon; 
as  if  a  man's  supreme  virtue  were  to  have  an  entity  of  his  own, 
not  a  hearsay  or  book-learned  or  parasitic  entity;  while  our 
exuberantly  optimistic  friend  Browning  is  just  about  as  far 
over  the  other  way;  as  if  every  ruined  life  had  only  to  await 
some  far  time  and  place  to  be  taken  into  an  irresistible  Hand, 
and  in  a  way  apart  from  its  bent  or  will  remoulded  to  its 
original  heavenly  design.  Both  poets,  in  their  zeal  for  the 
truth  they  see,  tip  the  balance  a  little  one-sidedly;  their  in- 
spiration, as  we  should  say,  is  not  plenary.  The  fault  is,  they 
have  not  reckoned  adequately  with  the  law  of  the  spirit  of  life; 
have  an  imperfect  ear  for  some  chords  of  its  music.  The  Bible 
writers  also,  like  all  fervid  seers,  overstate  things  sometimes; 
perhaps  they  could  not  wake  sluggish  attention  without;  but 


THE  LAW  OF  THE  SPIRIT  OF  LIFE       167 

in  the  end  the  Book  foots  up  even,  for  it  has  the  Spirit  with- 
out measure,  and  as  our  Lord  promised  to  His  disciples,  the 
Spirit  guides  eventually  into  all  truth,  by  taking  of  the  things 
of  His  perfect  manhood  and  showing  to  men. 

But  the  Spirit  also  shows  them  things  to  come;  with  the 
coming  of  full-orbed  life  to  light  comes  also  immortality.  Both 
these  poets  speak  in  parables  of  another  world;  they  are  set- 
ting forth,  in  the  images  current  among  men,  what  is  to  be 
when  eternity  in  the  heart  comes  out  beyond  the  bewilderments 
of  time  and  space.  But  so  also  does  the  Bible  speak  in  par- 
ables, in  the  same  images  current  among  men.  To  balance  up 
these  poets'  picturings  let  us  turn  to  the  great  scripture  parable 
of  judgment,  wherein  the  Spirit  of  Christ  shows  us  the  undy- 
ing principles  of  things  to  come.  You  know  what  I  mean: 
that  tremendous  scene  in  the  twenty-fifth  of  Matthew,  where 
before  the  throne  of  eternal  award  are  gathered  all  nations, 
Christian  and  heathen  alike.  There  too  the  essential  matter 
is  not  what  has  been  read  from  a  book  or  deduced  from  a 
written  code,  but  what  has  struck  into  the  tissues  of  individual 
life.  Let  us  for  a  moment  dismiss  from  our  minds  that  picture 
which  has  so  usurped  the  main  place  in  the  imagination  of 
many:  of  a  great  menagerie  of  sheep  and  goats,  or  a  crowd 
standing  right  and  left  before  a  throne,  disembodied  souls 
shivering  between  a  glory  and  a  flame.  The  parable,  in  fact, 
does  not  assume  that  they  are  disembodied,  nor  that  they  are 
in  a  post-obituary  world;  and  each  sentence  of  judgment  fills 
this  world  as  full  as  it  does  the  other,  fills  the  universe  as  far 
as  the  law  of  the  spirit  of  life  extends.  You  remember  on  what 
that  august  Inasmuch  as  ye  have,  or  have  not,  done  it,  turns. 
Not  on  their  being  aggressively  individual,  as  in  Kipling; 
though  each  for  himself  they  are,  and  the  judgment  is  indi- 
vidual; not  on  the  question  of  soul  integrity  or  disintegration, 
as  in  Browning;  though  this  is  a  profound  element  of  their 
case;  but  solely  on  the  disinterested  love  and  faith  that  is  in 
each  man,  on  how  the  spirit  of  their  life  has  been  directed. 
Those  souls  have  not  been  buying  heaven  on  their  merits,  nor 
incurring  hell  as  more  or  less  blundering  culprits;  there  is  an 


168  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

entire  lack  of  that  grading  in  their  awards  which  such  a  stand- 
ard would  require.  They  have  just  been  living  their  life,  a 
life  as  spontaneous  as  breathing;  and  the  question  turns  on 
what  that  life  has  been,  as  it  acted  on  man  as  man.  The  souls 
on  the  one  side,  you  remember,  are  surprised  to  find  that  they 
have  been  living  a  life  of  eternal  blessedness,  the  self-same  life 
that  is  in  their  Judge,  when  they  did  not  know  it;  just  by 
letting  that  divine  instinct  of  love  and  faith  have  free  course 
with  the  least  and  neediest,  whom  Christ  identifies  with  Him- 
self as  brothers.  The  souls  on  the  other  side,  too,  are  sur- 
prised—  why?  Not  because  they  have  done  such  base  and 
heinous  things ;  indeed  they  seem  to  think  they  have  been  very 
worthy  and  respectable  people,  ready  to  do  Christ  a  good  turn 
when  they  saw  Him,  —  but  they  never  saw  Him.  They  might 
have  seen  Him  all  the  while;  He  had  delegated  His  presence 
everywhere  among  them;  but  they  had  steeled  their  cold 
hearts,  or  left  unopened  their  sluggish  and  indifferent  hearts, 
to  the  plight  in  which,  in  the  person  of  the  neediest  and  un- 
worthiest  ones,  He  stood  before  them.  In  other  words,  it  is 
because  of  what  they  have  left  undone;  they  have  not  let  out 
their  personality  in  the  one  direction  worthy  of  full  manhood, 
the  free  outward  current  of  love  and  faith.  Man's  salvation 
—  the  word  salvation,  you  know,  means  the  souPs  wholeness 
and  health,  —  man's  immortality,  lies  in  his  being  the  glad 
vehicle  of  the  grace  of  God;  that  is  the  truth  of  the  parable. 
But,  you  say,  the  eternal  element,  —  that  awful  spectre  of 
everlasting  punishment,  —  what  of  that?  Would  you  live  in 
a  world  of  law  and  order  and  have  it  otherwise?  Just  think 
out  what  would  be  if  some  day  the  higher  order  of  things,  in 
which  we  trust  and  rejoice,  should  reverse  itself,  and  an  apa- 
thetic unloving  heart  be  happy.  It  is  the  eternal  law  of  being, 
unaffected  by  lapse  of  time  or  change  of  worlds,  that  love  and 
faith  in  the  life  are  their  own  blessedness  and  light,  and  that 
the  lack  of  these,  the  deadness  of  apathy  no  less  than  the  burn- 
ing of  hate,  has  inherent  in  it  the  unending  curse  of  the  Evil 
One.  Take  it  or  leave  it:  that  is  the  tremendous  alternative 
revealed  in  the  perfected  evolution  of  manhood. 


THE  LAW  OF  THE  SPIRIT  OF  LIFE       169 

Such  is  the  unescapable  ideal,  when  life  and  immortality 
come  to  light  together.  I  have  already  tried  your  patience, 
perhaps  too  long,  in  tracing  its  elements;  but  two  or  three 
things  remain  to  say,  belonging  especially  to  the  fact  that  this 
is  the  life,  the  motion,  of  that  initiative  which  we  call  the 
spirit.  On  this  larger  scale,  as  I  said,  everything  is  large  in 
proportion;  and  we  must  accommodate  our  thought  to  it,  all 
along  the  line. 

Well,  in  the  first  place,  you  have  noticed  that  this  parable 
of  judgment  does  not  say  anything  to  either  party  about  the 
sins  they  have  committed  or  avoided,  —  in  the  sense,  I  mean, 
of  the  transgression  of  law,  or  mistakes  and  blunders,  or  fail- 
ure to  live  up  to  their  moral  obligations.  It  is  all  about  the 
spirit  in  which  they  have  lived;  that  attitude  toward  their 
brother-men,  of  active  helpfulness  or  inert  indifference,  which 
has  become  to  them  a  second  nature,  as  instinctive  as  breath- 
ing. Strange,  is  it  not,  to  men  who  under  the  long  empire  of 
law  had  got  their  whole  life  interpreted  in  terms  of  a  huge 
debit  and  credit  account?  The  debit  and  credit  idea,  the 
question  of  obligation  and  justice,  has  wholly  disappeared,  and 
the  free  spirit  of  life  has  taken  its  place.  Mercy,  it  would 
seem,  has  swallowed  up  judgment,  and  ,the  sins,  as  such,  are 
forgiven,  blotted  out  of  the  book.  This  is  what  has  been  held 
out  before  men,  as  a  heartening  influence,  a  reassuring  hope, 
all  through  their  twilight  period,  when  they  were  as  children 
stumbling  along  towards  the  light,  or  as  bond-slaves  with  the 
inevitable  burdens  of  life  upon  them.  Where  sin  abounded 
grace  did  much  more  abound.  "All  manner  of  sin  and  blas- 
phemy," as  our  Lord  says,  "shall  be  forgiven  unto  men."  All? 
All  except  one;  and  here  comes  in  the  awfullest  revelation  of 
the  Bible.  There  is  one  sin  that  cannot  be  forgiven.  "Who- 
soever speaketh  a  word  against  the  Son  of  man,  it  shall  be 
forgiven  him ;  but  whosoever  speaketh  against  the  Holy  Ghost, 
it  shall  not  be  forgiven  him,  neither  in  this  world,  neither  in 
the  world  to  come."  You  know  the  vague  speculations  that 
have  clustered  round  this  mysterious  sin  against  the  Holy 
Spirit;  I  remember  how,  when  I  was  a  boy,  people  used  to  con- 


1 70  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

jecture,  with  bated  breath,  what  particular  vice  or  iniquity  it 
might  be,  and  wonder  if  a  man  might  fall  into  it  without  being 
aware  of  the  fact.  It  seemed  like  a  kind  of  trap  which  the 
arbitrary  Power  above  had  set  and  hid  in  the  way,  for  men  to 
tumble  into  inadvertently.  But  I  think  the  scale  and  level  of 
truth  we  have  reached  removes  the  mystery.  The  sin  against 
the  Holy  Spirit  —  the  spirit  of  wholeness  and  health  —  is  just 
the  rejection  of  the  spirit  of  life.  It  takes  a  peculiarly  har- 
dened, not  to  say  utterly  perverted  and  fiendish,  heart  to  re- 
ject the  gracious  spirit  of  life,  when  its  motions  and  fruits  are 
seen.  You  remember  what  it  was  that  called  forth  this  as- 
sertion of  our  Lord's.  The  Pharisees,  seeing  Him  do  the  self- 
same works  of  goodwill  and  love  which  as  Judge  He 
pronounces  blessed,  said,  in  a  frenzied  antipathy  of  bigotry, 
"Why,  this  is  devil's  work;  this  fellow  is  in  league  with  Beelze- 
bub." Jesus  did  not  resent  this  malignant  word  as  against  His 
person;  but,  he  said,  the  spirit  that  can  say  such  a  thing,  the 
spirit  that  would  bring  forth  the  fruits  of  such  a  verdict,  why, 
it  is  the  polar  opposite  of  anything  like  forgiveness,  love,  help- 
fulness, faith;  how  can  a  spirit  that  cannot  forgive  be  for- 
given? It  stops,  so  to  say,  the  circulation  of  the  current  of 
life,  which  is  flowing  from  the  Father  of  spirits  to  the  least  and 
lowest  corner  of  His  creation.  So  the  matter,  with  all  its  aw- 
ful portent,  comes  back  to  the  same  test  of  life  that  we  have 
seen  applied  in  the  parable  of  judgment;  simple,  yet  as  radical 
as  life  itself.  On  this  subject  let  our  American  Hawthorne, 
who  you  know  made  such  lifelong  specialty  of  the  pathology 
of  the  human  heart,  speak  the  defining  word.  In  his  story  of 
Ethan  Brand,  you  remember,  he  portrays  a  man  who,  in  the 
cold  spirit  of  research,  set  out  to  find  the  unpardonable  sin; 
and  he  roamed  the  world  over,  stopping  at  nothing  that  seemed 
to  promise  a  solution  of  his  problem;  blighting  hearts  and 
ruining  many  a  life,  without  mercy  or  compunction;  only  to 
find  at  last  that  the  sin  was  in  his  own  heart,  and  had 
so  demonized  his  nature  that  his  very  laugh  caused  a  shudder 
in  whoever  heard  it.  He  had  come  back  from  his  long  quest 
to  the  place  where  years  before  he  had  worked  as  a  humble 


THE  LAW  OF  THE  SPIRIT  OF  LIFE       171 

lime-burner;  now  a  highly  educated  man,  with  a  sardonic  sense 
of  utter  separateness  from  his  kind,  whom  one  and  all  he  de- 
spised, and  with  an  intellect  as  keen  and  hard  as  steel;  "but," 
Hawthorne  goes  on  to  say,  "where  was  the  heart?  That,  in- 
deed, had  withered,  —  had  contracted,  —  had  hardened,  — 
had  perished!  It  has  ceased  to  partake  of  the  universal  throb. 
He  had  lost  his  hold  of  the  magnetic  chain  of  humanity.  He 
was  no  longer  a  brother-man,  opening  the  chambers  or  the 
dungeons  of  our  common  nature  by  the  key  of  holy  sympathy, 
which  gave  him  a  right  to  share  in  all  its  secrets;  he  was  now 
a  cold  observer,  looking  on  mankind  as  the  subject  of  his  ex- 
periment, and,  at  length,  converting  man  and  woman  to  be  his 
puppets,  and  pulling  the  wires  that  moved  them  to  such  de- 
grees of  crime  as  were  demanded  for  his  study." 

Such  an  extreme  of  human  perversity  must  necessarily  be 
exceptional  in  actual  fact;  there  are  too  many  motions  of  our 
God-given  nature  working  against  the  completion  of  it. 
Through  some  chink  the  power  of  disinterested  love  or  self- 
forgetting  faith  will  filter  in:  through  the  family,  or  the  lover, 
or  the  comrade,  or  the  country,  or  the  cause  of  generous  en- 
deavor, nay,  even  through  the  art  or  research  in  which  for  the 
sake  of  the  world's  welfare  or  instruction  a  man  may  lose  his 
selfishness.  There  are  many  feeders,  when  we  come  to  think 
of  it,  to  our  soul's  health  and  wholeness;  we  do  not  have  to 
get  it  all  out  of  a  book;  many  avenues  by  which  the  light  and 
life,  that  are  smiting  themselves  into  the  universe,  come  in  to 
vitalize  in  various  degrees  our  individual  being,  and  help  us 
live,  as  God  lives,  for  other  than  selfish  issues.  The  very  work 
we  do,  which  we  love  and  try  to  make  prevail  for  the  upbuild- 
ing of  the  world  because  in  some  individual  feature  we  can  do 
it  better  than  any  one  else,  is  a  means  of  grace.  And  so  the 
rank  and  file  of  us,  musing  as  we  are  on  how  to  be  a  strength 
and  uplift  to  some  less  endowed  comrade,  and  how  thus  to 
leave  the  world  better  than  we  found  it,  are  in  the  position  of 
learners  undergoing  a  gracious  education;  the  fact  that  we  are 
not  beyond  forgiveness,  and  that  we  can  bank  on  sufficient 
grace,  is  proof  of  this.  For  forgiveness  is  essentially  a  recipro- 


I72  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

cal  thing;  it  cannot  exist  one-sidedly;  the  fulness  of  life  that 
we  receive  is  a  fulness  of  grace  for  grace.  It  was  there  for 
Ethan  Brand  all  the  while,  just  as  the  air  and  the  water  and 
the  food  of  earth  all  the  days  of  his  hardening  career  kept  him 
alive  and  contributed  to  the  discipline  of  that  merciless  in- 
tellect; it  was  there  though  his  sin  was  unpardonable;  but  be- 
cause he  would  not  open  his  being  to  it,  by  loving  as  he  was 
loved,  and  committing  himself  according  to  the  committal  that 
life  itself  had  made  to  him,  it  must  remain  an  unfinished  thing, 
a  proffer  and  not  a  gift.  It  cannot  be  otherwise;  it  is  the  law 
of  the  spirit  of  life.  So  the  prayer  that  is  taught  us,  by  which 
our  daily  object-lesson  is  kept  in  mind,  is,  "Forgive  us  our 
debts,  as  we  forgive  our  debtors." 

But  by  the  same  pervasiveness  of  grace  for  grace  the  other 
extreme  of  the  scale  is  just  as  majestic  as  the  one  we  have  con- 
sidered was  terrible;  a  height  as  great  as  the  depth.  As  in  the 
tremendous  gift  of  spiritual  freedom  there  inheres  the  possi- 
bility of  a  sin  unpardonable,  so  in  the  same  divine  trust  in- 
heres the  potency  of  a  well-being  which  no  discount  of  flesh 
or  lower  nature  or  evil  heredity  can  impair  beyond  forgiveness. 
And  this  is  it.  This  spirit  of  life,  moving  freely  as  "faith  which 
worketh  by  love,"  redeems  the  whole  man.  No  accumulated 
debt  of  the  lower  nature  can  over-balance  it;  it  is  what  the 
Scripture  calls  the  power  of  an  endless  life.  We  have  done 
our  best,  I  am  inclined  to  think,  to  make  the  idea  of  redemp- 
tion unreal  and  remote,  by  regarding  it  as  a  sort  of  churchly 
magic,  and  narrowing  its  operation  to  the  historic  work  of  one 
Person.  It  is  Christ,  we  say,  who  redeems  us,  and  other  foun- 
dation can  no  man  lay.  That  is  profoundly  true.  But  as 
our  study  has  revealed  Christ  in  idea,  as  the  perfect  manhood 
after  which  the  spirit  of  man  has  dimly  struggled,  the  idea  of 
the  redemption  He  works  is  correspondingly  enlarged  and  clari- 
fied. We  have,  in  fact,  found  the  essential  Christ;  found  Him 
in  the  spirit  of  grace  and  the  courage  of  faith.  Suppose  this 
essence  of  highest  manhood,  by  whatever  historic  agency  it 
got  there,  becomes  the  life  and  motive  power  of  the  individual 
man.  Well,  this  redeems  his  nature;  wherever  he  is,  America 


THE  LAW  OF  THE  SPIRIT  OF  LIFE       173 

or  Timbuctoo,  whenever  he  lives,  twentieth  century  or  dark 
ages;  redeems  him  according  to  the  completeness  with  which 
it  possesses  him.  Our  best  approach  to  the  notion  of  redemp- 
tion, I  think,  is  the  simplest;  just  through  our  everyday  cur- 
rent terms.  We  say  of  a  man  he  has  some  disagreeable 
unpleasant  things  about  him  —  I  suppose  that  may  be  said 
of  many  of  us  —  or  he  has  the  relics  of  old  vices  and  evil  habi- 
tudes; but  he  has  this  redeeming  character,  that  he  is  square 
as  a  die,  you  know  where  to  find  him,  and  that  he  will  stand 
loyally  and  comradelike  by  any  one  in  misfortune  or  need. 
And  that  is  the  kind  of  man  we  can  tie  to.  We  can  forgive  him 
a  great  deal,  we  can  forgive  him  everything,  for  the  sake  of 
that.  Well,  don't  you  see,  that  is  what  redeems  him ;  the  good- 
hearted,  common-sense  world  pronounces  him  redeemed  by 
that  controlling  quality;  and  do  you  suppose  God  will  do  less? 
And  this  simple  pronouncement  translates  these  great  con- 
cepts of  love  and  faith  into  the  idiom  of  every  common  life; 
you  can  see  how  they  apply  to  the  laborer,  and  the  outcast, 
and  the  business  man,  and  the  man  who  is  lost  in  the  crowd, 
no  less  than  to  the  church  member  and  the  millionaire  and  the 
man  of  high  position.  It  is  the  magnetic  pulsation  of  the  great 
loving,  suffering  heart  of  humanity  that  redeems  him,  that 
makes  him  an  uplifting  and  vitalizing  power,  and  therefore 
in  essence  a  new  man.  Every  lowliest  position  in  life  is  its 
opportunity;  its  leaven  is  pervasive  everywhere.  The  living 
spirit  of  the  universe  is  there,  working  according  to  its  sphere; 
as  the  mystic  beauty  of  the  ocean  resides  in  the  rill  and  the 
dewdrop.  For  what  is  being  square  as  a  die,  or  whatever 
President  Roosevelt  called  "the  square  deal,"  but  just  the  ma- 
jestic fulfilling  of  the  law  of  truth;  and  what  is  standing  by 
your  brother-man  in  need  and  trouble,  but  the  practical  dy- 
namic of  love?  It  is  the  one  direction  in  which  life  may  be 
so  focussed  as  to  be  aware  of  its  essential  unity  and  common 
centre.  All  else  —  knowledge,  culture,  money-getting,  ambi- 
tion, power  —  is  centrifugal;  it  scatters  men  into  classes  and 
warring  interests  and  tends  to  hardness  of  heart.  But  here 
on  this  level  neither  God  nor  man  can  be  a  respecter  of  per- 


174  rHE  LIFE  INDEED 

sons;  the  race  may  have  these  separating  tendencies,  but  this 
resolves  them  and  redeems  the  man. 

You  know  what  a  role  this  simple  idea  of  the  redeeming 
trait  has  played  in  literature  through  the  past  half-century. 
The  most  popular  theme  of  poetry  and  fiction,  perhaps,  has 
been  some  form  of  heroic  self-sacrifice,  or  the  finding  of  a  true 
and  loving  heart  in  the  most  unpromising  men  and  places.  It 
is  this  detection  of  the  soul  of  good  in  things  evil  that  has  set 
authors  to  raking  the  slums  and  the  mining  camps  and  the 
cow-boy  ranches  and  the  army  barracks  of  far  India;  always 
there  is  brought  to  light  some  pearl  of  sterling  character  and 
unobtrusive  sacrifice  which  has  made  the  most  sordid  sur- 
roundings and  the  roughest  manners  forgivable  and  beautiful. 
Why,  this  aspect  of  redemption  has  almost  become  the  staple 
of  our  thoughts  of  life.  At  the  same  time,  we  must  confess, 
this  same  theme,  I  think  beyond  anything  else,  has  had  a 
powerful  dissolving  influence  with  the  masses  of  men,  to  keep 
them  out  of  the  churches;  due  perhaps  to  the  fact  that  the 
idea  is  just  now  in  that  unbalanced  excess  which  holds  men's 
eyes  from  seeing  more  than  one  great  thing  at  once.  For  in 
the  discovery  that  unexacting  love  and  self-sacrificing  faith 
are  the  one  redemption  of  manhood,  men  have  got  the  mistaken 
prejudice  that  the  well-fed  and  prosperous  churchman  stands 
for  something  alien  to  this,  something  exclusive  and  Pharisaic, 
and  that  while  thus  the  poor  have  not  the  gospel  preached  to 
them,  the  heart  of  the  matter,  the  real  saving  quality,  can 
just  as  well  be  found  elsewhere,  and  maintained  apart  from 
ecclesiastical  machinery.  Of  course  this  prejudice  is  wrong, 
and  I  think  temporary.  But  does  it  not  behoove  us,  who  love 
the  place  where  the  saving  Name  is  named,  to  see  to  it  that 
the  power  of  redemption  do  not  escape  us,  even  by  one  motion 
of  exclusiveness,  and  take  up  its  recognized  abode  in  places 
where  our  refinement  and  taste  have  perhaps  been  indulging 
a  similar  prejudice?  Let  us  not  lose  sight  of  the  real  heart  of 
the  matter;  we  can  afford  to  crucify  our  tastes  a  little  for  the 
sake  of  seeing  straight.  Literature  has  gloried,  perhaps  over- 
much, in  setting  forth  its  new  theme  coarsely  and  brutally; 


THE  LAW  OF   THE   SPIRIT  OF  LIFE       175 

but  the  idea  is  there,  and  it  has  found  men's  hearts,  assuring 
them,  perhaps  by  its  very  rudeness,  that  nothing  is  henceforth 
to  be  despised  as  common  or  unclean.  Chemistry,  as  a  pro- 
fessor of  it  once  remarked  to  me,  recognizes  no  such  thing  as 
dirt  or  stench;  it  is  too  much  concerned  with  the  vital  elements 
of  God's  world  for  that.  You  remember  that  poem  of  John 
Hay's,  which  perhaps  did  a  leading  part  to  set  the  ball  of  this 
new  theme  rolling;  wherein  a  swearing,  reckless  steamboat 
engineer,  when  his  boat  was  on  fire,  held  her  bow  against  the 
bank  until  every  last  man  was  safe  ashore,  and  because  he 
would  not  desert  his  post,  bravely  gave  up  his  life.  Here  is 
the  verdict  that  took  the  popular  heart,  and  has  been  repeated 
in  many  a  variation  ever  since: 

He  weren't  no  saint,  —  but  at  jedgment 

I'd  run  my  chance  with  Jim, 
'Longside  of  some  pious  gentlemen 

That  wouldn't  shook  hands  with  him. 
He  seen  his  duty,  a  dead-sure  thing, — 

And  went  for  it  thar  and  then; 
And  Christ  ain't  a  going  to  be  too  hard 

On  a  man  that  "died  for  men. 

The  poem,  like  Kipling's  and  Browning's,  has  struck  for  a 
single  point  of  truth,  brutally  and  straight  from  the  shoulder; 
but  the  point  is  central,  and  it  translates  the  redeeming  ca- 
pacity of  manhood  into  the  coarsest  vernacular.  Let  us  not 
suffer  its  rudeness  to  switch  us  off  on  a  side-issue,  while  we 
gather  up  our  skirts  to  avoid  the  contact.  For  in  its  heart  it 
is  the  same  thing  that  we  are  coming  to  love  and  reverence  as 
the  principle  of  holiest  manhood;  it  is,  albeit  uncouth,  a 
homely  echo  of  the  parable  by  which  Christ  judges  the  world. 

Thus,  I  have  tried  to  trace  what  this  life  of  ours  is,  when, 
at  the  fulness  of  the  revealing  time,  it  has  become  a  free  in- 
itiative, a  spirit,  and  when  in  the  light  that  has  risen  to  guide 
it,  it  has  evolved  its  own  higher  law  of  working.  We  have  seen 
what  man  has  it  in  him  to  do  when  he  does  as  he  likes,  and 
when  love  has  vitalized  his  committal  to  his  world.  It  is  a 
divine  pattern,  an  ideal,  which  now  the  Christian  ages  are  to 


I76  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

make  real,  by  making  it  the  natural  way  of  living.  And  now 
for  the  slow  planting  of  it  in  individual  hearts,  man  by  man, 
the  naturalization  of  it  in  a  gainsaying  world.  It  takes  long; 
but  its  season  of  springtide  and  summer  and  harvest  is  a  season 
in  which  a  thousand  years  are  as  one  day.  And  we  cannot  get 
round  this  fact,  that  it  is  the  law  of  risen  manhood,  and  not 
one  jot  or  tittle  can  pass  until  all  is  fulfilled.  Our  business,  as 
we  see  it,  is  just  to  live  it  unreservedly,  and  by  life  and  word 
to  teach  men  so.  "Write  the  things  which  thou  has  seen," 
says  the  Revealer  to  St.  John  in  Patmos,  "and  the  things  which 


are." 


V 

THE   SUPREME   HISTORIC   VENTURE 

WHAT,   AS   MATTER   OF   RECORDED   FACT,    CAME   OF 

PERFECT   COMMITTAL   TO   THE   LAWS   OF 

THE   SPIRIT   OF   LIFE 

I.  FROM  THE  EXCEEDING  HIGH  MOUNTAIN 

II.  THUS  IT  BECOMETH  Us 

III.  To  THIS  END  WAS  I  BORN 

IV.  THE  DECEASE  ACCOMPLISHED  AT  JERUSALEM 


V 

THE   SUPREME   HISTORIC   VENTURE 

HISTORICALLY  speaking,  the  chapter  we  have  just 
finished  has  run  far  ahead  of  our  subject.  We  have, 
so  to  say,  slipped  the  cable  of  the  actual  and  launched 
out  on  the  ocean  of  the  ideal;  and  this,  by  the  methods  of  re- 
search that  prevail  in  our  time,  is  something  not  unlike  a  sin. 
For  a  generation  or  more  now,  men  have  been  so  absorbed  in 
the  contemplation  of  what  has  been  and  its  laws  that  they  have 
suffered  themselves  to  become  wellnigh  color-blind  to  the  all- 
pervading  prophecy  and  potency  of  what  is  to  be,  which  is 
the  law  of  the  spirit  of  life.  And  so  here  at  the  opening  of  the 
twentieth  Christian  century,  we  are  confronted  with  the 
strange  fact  that  the  vision  of  the  life  absolute,  with  its  corol- 
lary of  immortality,  counts  for  hardly  more  as  a  grounded  con- 
viction than  it  did  in  the  twilight  period  of  Old  Testament 
days.  For  this  there  may  be  various  reasons.  I  can  think  of 
two  main  ones.  One  is  that  while  the  great  abysmal  current 
of  the  spirit  has  all  the  while  been  silently  heaving  toward  its 
flood, — 

Such   a  tide   as   moving   seems   asleep, 
Too  full  for  sound  and  foam,  — 

yet  it  has  encountered  so  many  eddies  and  cross-currents  of 
temporary  endeavor,  so  many  things  that  make  noise  and  tur- 
moil, that  men  have  inveterately  tended  to  take  the  surface 
for  the  eternal  depths.  Another  reason,  I  am  tempted  to  think, 
is  that  men's  minds  have  sometimes  become  darkened  from 
sheer  excess  of  light.  They  have  hesitated  to  admit  the  di- 
vine, not  because  it  was  hidden  but  because  it  was  so  evident; 
like  the  bluff,  impulsive  Peter  they  have  cried  out,  "Depart 
from  me,  for  I  am  a  sinful  man,  O  Lord."  Of  course  they 
would  be  slow  to  own  this  to  themselves,  or  to  declare 

179 


180  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

for  darkness  rather  than  light.  Their  fault  is  rather  like  the 
fault  of  those  who  have  an  ear  for  music,  and  delight  in  it  after 
the  inner  man,  but  put  it  by  as  the  music  of  the  spheres  or 
of  a  more  ethereal  future.  As  a  recent  writer  puts  it,  speaking 
of  Plato  and  his  idealizing  mood:  "Doubtless  the  concord  he 
conceived  was  beautiful.  But  the  dissonances  he  would  have 
silenced,  but  which,  with  ever  augmenting  force,  peal  and 
crash,  from  his  day  to  ours,  through  the  echoing  vault  of  time, 
embody,  as  I  am  apt  to  think,  a  harmony  more  august  than 
even  he  was  able  to  imagine,  and  in  their  intricate  succession 
weave  the  plan  of  a  world-symphony  too  high  to  be  appre- 
hended save  in  part  by  our  grosser  sense,  but  perceived  with 
delight  by  the  pure  intelligence  of  immortal  spirits."  This, 
you  see,  is  a  veritable  recoil  from  excess  of  light;  the  reluc- 
tance of  man,  even  though  with  such  ideals  surging  within 
him,  to  own  that  he  is  an  immortal  spirit,  and  that  such  music 
is  just  the  idiom  of  his  immortality.  The  light  is  good,  he 
says,  is  glorious;  but  it  is  not  practical;  the  use  of  it  must  be 
postponed  to  a  more  favorable  state.  So  he  shades  his  eyes 
from  it  and  turns  again  to  the  shadows;  ignoring  the  com- 
pleted design  for  the  chips  and  dust-heaps  of  history,  in  his 
search  for  something  more  workable  and  feasible.  As  a  result 
the  thing  that  he  most  desperately  needs  appeals  in  vain.  You 
remember  how  Browning  makes  the  aged  John,  as  he  is  dying, 
set  forth  this  idea: 

I  say,  the  acknowledgment  of  God  in  Christ 
Accepted  by  thy  reason,  solves  for  thee 
All  questions  in  the  earth  and  out  of  it, 
And  has  so  far  advanced  thee  to  be  wise. 
Wouldst  thou  unprove  this  to  re-prove  the  proved? 
In  life's  mere  minute,  with  power  to  use  that  proof, 
Leave  knowledge  and  revert  to  how  it  sprung? 
Thou  hast  it;  use  it  and  forthwith,  or  die! 

Then  by  a  telling  figure  he  illustrates  what  is  the  real  ailment 
of  men  who  so  perversely  reopen  a  clear  case: 

For  I  say,  this  is  death  and  the  sole  death, 
When  a  man's  loss  comes  to  him  from  his  gain, 
Darkness  from  light,  from  knowledge  ignorance, 


THE   SUPREME  HISTORIC   VENTURE      181 

And  lack  of  love  from  love  made  manifest; 

A  lamp's  death  when,  replete  with  oil,  it  chokes; 

A  stomach's  when,  surcharged  with  food,  it  starves. 

There  is  something  in  this  thought  of  the  life  indeed  which 
we  must  face  and  resolve.  When  the  ideal  becomes  so  high, 
as  in  the  evolutionary  course  it  is  bound  to  do,  its  first  effect 
is  to  give  us  pause.  Is  this,  we  ask,  the  law  of  our  higher  na- 
ture, these  the  tremendous  exactions  of  love  and  faith,  when 
the  fulness  of  the  time  is  here,  and  our  duty  henceforth,  if 
we  would  be  free  and  perfect  men,  is  to  take  these  ideals, 
these  potencies  within  us,  and  make  them  real?  And  so  our 
tendency  is,  either  to  stand  dazed  and  benumbed  before  them, 
thus  leaving  them  practically  inoperative;  or,  else,  deeming 
them  a  misfit  on  earth,  to  postpone  the  working  of  them  to 
some  realm  out  of  time  and  space,  to  some  mystic  heaven, 
which  we  dread  as  much  as  we  desire  because  there,  as  we 
think,  we  shall  have  to  be  good.  A  misfit  here,  we  say,  be- 
cause here  are  all  these  eddies  and  cross-currents  of  spirit,  and 
all  this  law  of  sin  in  our  members;  we  could  love  God  and  our 
neighbor  if  it  were  not  for  these,  but  here  alas,  we  must  fight 
the  devil  with  fire. 

Well,  we  saw  the  deadlock  that  paralyzed  the  growing  spirit 
of  man,  when  the  ideal  was  not  yet  in  sight;  here  we  seem  to 
have  encountered  a  similar  one  when  it  is.  What  then  can  be 
done?  What  shall  overcome  this  strange  inertia  of  the  spirit, 
and  start  the  wheels  of  being  out  of  the  clay  in  which  they  are 
again  stuck  fast?  There  has  been  no  lack  of  effort,  no  lack 
of  experimenting  on  life.  Men  have  proved  abundantly  that 
manhood  has  a  surplusage  of  being,  a  mighty  overflow,  which 
must  needs  be  laid  out  somewhere.  As  Ruskin  puts  it:  "It 
has  tried  fighting,  and  preaching,  and  fasting,  buying  and  sell- 
ing, pomp  and  parsimony,  pride  and  humiliation,  —  every  pos- 
sible manner  of  existence  in  which  it  would  conjecture  there 
was  any  happiness  or  dignity;  and  all  the  while,  as  it  bought, 
sold,  and  fought,  and  fasted,  and  wearied  itself  with  policies, 
and  ambitions,  and  self-denials,  God  had  placed  its  real  happi- 
ness in  the  keeping  of"  —  well,  never  mind  what;  it  is  not 


1 82  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

to  our  purpose  here,  and  man,  I  am  persuaded,  has  in  him  a 
higher  hunger  than  for  happiness.  All  these  things  have  been 
carried  to  the  pitch  of  heroism.  Self-denial  and  asceticism 
have  attended  them  all,  and  all  are  just  as  susceptible  to  fanat- 
icism and  insane  excess  as  is  religion  itself.  Ruskin  says 
further:  "If  there  were  any  other  mistake  that  the  world  could 
make,  it  would  of  course  make  it.  But  I  see  not  that  there  is 
any  other.  ...  It  has  now  made  its  experiments  in  every 
possible  direction  but  the  right  one;  and  it  seems  that  it  must, 
at  last,  try  the  right  one,  in  a  mathematical  necessity."  So 
it  surely  does.  But  now  that  the  spirit  of  life  has  evolved  its 
law,  and  the  one  way  of  love  and  faith  stands  before  men  for 
adoption,  men  recoil  almost  in  dismay.  It  is  not  workable, 
they  say.  Heroic  as  they  are  in  every  other  direction,  here 
their  heroism  fails  ignominously.  The  ideal  has  revealed  it- 
self as 

The  high  that  proved  too  high,  the  heroic  for  earth  too  hard 

and  so,  while  it  may  do  for  poets  and  musicians,  whose  busi- 
ness is  to  dream  and  sing,  for  the  hard-headed  man  of  affairs 
it  is  too  evidently  a  misfit.  Pusillanimous  mortals !  the  summit 
of  life  has  uncovered  their  weak  point.  They  are  afraid  to 
go  over  and  take  possession  of  their  kingdom;  afraid  of  what 
some  one  else  will  do,  some  cheater  or  traitor,  who  as  soon  as 
they  dare  to  love  and  trust,  will  take  a  mean  advantage.  If 
only  it  were  not  an  individual  matter,  wherein  each  must  take 
the  initiative  for  himself,  how  much  more  feasible  it  would  be. 
If  only  love  could  be  legislated  and  sworn  to,  like  an  oath  of 
fealty;  the  whole  human  race  dropping  its  weapons  and  agree- 
ing with  one  consent  to  lift  together,  heave  ho !  what  a  heaven 
on  earth  would  spring  up,  to  be  sure!  That  is  what,  as  matter 
of  fact,  men's  dreams  of  social  and  national  regeneration  to- 
day reduce  themselves  to.  But  no:  that  does  not  satisfy  other 
conditions  of  the  ideal;  that  would  be  universal  bondage  again, 
under  another  name,  not  freedom  at  all;  besides  love  is  not 
love  at  all,  but  merely  good  manners,  when  it  must  depend  for 
its  existence  on  law.  Its  breath  and  finer  spirit  evaporate  just 


THE  SUPREME  HISTORIC  VENTURE      183 

as  soon  as  it  binds  itself  to  the  letter  and  the  oath.  Love  and 
faith  cannot  organize  a  trust;  they  must  be  a  life-giving  spirit, 
they  must  be  individual.  Men  cannot  live  this  highest  ideal 
in  a  mass ;  they  must  come  in,  and  keep  in,  one  by  one. '  You 
remember  the  whimsical  parable  by  which  Dr.  Holmes  set 
forth  the  failure  of  massed  play  on  the  part  of  humanity.  He 
figured  the  whole  world  as  having  once  agreed  together  that 
at  a  certain  specified  moment  all  should  raise  a  mighty  shout 
in  unison;  and  when  the  moment  came  it  proved  to  be  the 
only  absolutely  silent  moment  that  the  world  ever  knew,  for 
every  man  was  listening  to  hear  how  mighty  the  shout  would 
be.  Well,  the  moment  of  the  fulness  of  the  time  comes,  and 
men  have  eyes  to  see  in  what  its  glory  consists;  but  to  this 
day,  through  all  their  civilizations  and  communal  interests, 
they  are  waiting,  and  listening,  and  wrangling  and  making 
oath-bound  treaties,  until  all  shall  be  compelled  to  pull  to- 
gether, and  no  one  shall  take  advantage  of  his  neighbor.  And 
then  they  say  their  ideal  is  not  workable.  No:  it  is  not,  on 
such  principles. 

Earth  is  silent,  ominously  silent,  when  men  try  to  shout  in 
unison.  But  there  was  one  man,  a  simple  artisan  in  an  obscure 
Galilean  village,  who  dared  to  bear  His  whole  weight,  without 
reservation  or  flinching,  on  the  completed  ideal  of  life;  and  his 
still  small  voice  is  heard  round  the  world  and  through  the 
eternities.  Under  the  tumult  it  sounds  ever,  the  sweet  under- 
tone of  peace  and  goodwill;  through  the  jarring  discords  of 
sects  and  opinions  and  manifold  quarrels  of  men  its  uniform 
note  is  heard,  and  in  the  end  it  compels  attention;  the  very 
date  that  we  write  at  the  head  of  our  letters  and  documents 
numbers  the  years  of  his  gracious  message  to  the  world.  The 
heroism  that  was  so  lacking  is  here  at  last,  calm  and  magnifi- 
cently simple;  and  never,  in  battle  or  physical  peril,  was  hero- 
ism like  it.  We  are  resuming  history  now,  after  our  long 
excursion  into  the  ideal;  and  this  is  the  world-filling  historic 
fact.  Nay,  the  ideal  itself  did  not  get  into  words,  until  it  had 
this  historic  fact  as  datum;  we  could  not  speak  the  dialect  of 
the  new  life,  or  realize  its  rhythms  and  cadences,  until  we 


1 84  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

heard  it  spoken,  and  the  word  itself  had  breath,  working  with 
human  hands  the  creed  of  creeds.  A  word  is  the  embodiment 
of  an  idea ;  and  this  life  was  God's  idea  of  men,  and  man's  idea 
of  his  own  manhood,  which  had  so  long  struggled  for  expres- 
sion. We  cannot  state  in  simplest  terms  the  largeness  of  this 
historic  fact  without  seeming  to  invest  it  with  miracle.  Yet 
how  sane  and  sincere  it  all  is;  the  echo  of  our  central  being; 
the  plainest  man  can  understand  it.  It  does  seem  as  if  here 
we  were  face  to  face  with  the  secret  mind  of  evolution;  as  if 
there  must  needs  be  revealed  an  individual,  the  individual,  in 
whom  should  be  typed  the  elements  of  personal  evolution. 
There  must  be  a  pioneer  in  every  exploration,  a  practical  de- 
signer of  every  noble  edifice.  Somebody,  some  man  like  our- 
selves, with  our  manhood  capacities  of  mind  and  spirit,  must 
translate  into  act  and  life  every  upbuilding  idea;  and  as  the 
idea  is  more  momentous,  his  originative  spirit  must  be  stronger, 
his  personality  more  imposing.  Must  this  not  be  supremely 
so  in  the  highest  ideal  of  all,  the  profoundest  movement  of  the 
spirit  of  life  that  ever  took  place  on  earth?  How  large  this 
idea  is,  and  what  demands  it  makes  of  manhood,  we  have  seen. 
Think  then  of  the  man  who  is  large  enough  to  take  it  in,  and 
strong  enough  to  live  it.  No  matter  if  he  is  a  carpenter;  no 
matter  if  he  does  not  cry  nor  lift  up;  no  matter  if  he  has  not 
where  to  lay  his  head.  Life  is  more  than  livelihood,  and  a 
man's  life  consists  not  in  the  abundance  of  things  he  posses- 
seth.  The  idea  it  is,  and  the  perfectly  adequate  committal 
of  spirit  to  it,  which  makes  him  great.  Greater  therefore  than 
man,  a  miracle  of  personality,  with  hopelessly  unattainable 
elements?  Jesus  made  no  such  pretension;  all  the  gifts  He 
brought  are  placed  freely  at  our  disposal.  But  certainly  He 
is  greater  than  any  of  our  race  have  been,  before  or  since; 
though  His  spirit  has  begotten  many  a  noble  copy  of  His  great- 
ness, and  many  a  martyr  to  it.  One  and  all,  however,  lacked 
somehow  of  the  fulness,  as  the  echo  lacks  the  substance  and 
volume  of  the  original  sound;  then  too  there  is  to  be  reckoned 
with  the  greatness  of  the  pioneer  effort  and  committal,  like 
the  energy  of  a  chemical  reaction  in  its  nascent  state.  But 


THE   SUPREME  HISTORIC   VENTURE      185 

mainly  their  lack  was  in  completeness  of  committal;  to  all  of 
them  at  some  flinching  point,  or  some  occultation  of  wisdom, 
His  voice  comes  as  it  did  to  Peter,  "O  thou  of  little 
faith,  wherefore  didst  thou  doubt?"  Men  hold  back  and 
tremble,  or  try  to  get  their  fellows  to  make  the  start,  or  wait 
for  some  signal  when  all  shall  go  together.  And  so  they  lose 
themselves  in  the  crowd;  their  soul  is  not  their  own,  is  not 
free.  That  is  the  history  of  the  mass  of  humanity.  The  law 
of  the  species,  or  of  the  race,  or  of  the  land,  or  of  the  social 
convention,  is  still  their  tyrant.  They  are  not  the  ones  to 
overcome  the  inertia  of  manhood.  What  is  needed,  it  would 
seem,  at  this  crisis-point  of  individual  evolution,  is  just  a  man 
who  will  let  himself  go,  in  the  perfect  abandon  of  the  free 
spirit  of  life,  trusting  that  the  native  powers  of  manhood,  as 
trained  by  law  and  counseled  by  wisdom,  are  sound  and  true, 
and  holding  that  faith  patiently,  in  spite  of  evil  seeming,  until 
it  has  justified  itself  in  the  answering  heart  of  man.  This,  it 
would  seem,  is  required  in  the  large  scientific  plan,  if  the  com- 
pletely evolved  personality  is  ever  to  come  to  light;  an  indi- 
vidual is  needed  to  stake  out  the  way  which  henceforth  indi- 
viduality, free  from  the  trammels  of  the  species,  must  take. 

Such  a  man  has  actually  lived  among  us;  has  lived  a  life 
so  common  and  approachable  that  all  may  avail  themselves  of 
its  light;  and  yet  all  His  life  was  heroic,  in  the  calm  heroism 
of  daring  to  trust  the  spirit  of  life  to  the  uttermost,  and  ven- 
turing on  the  unexplored  ocean  of  love  and  faith,  undismayed 
by  the  storms  of  consequence,  and  consistent  to  whatever  end. 
This  is  why  I  call  His  life,  as  He  went  about  doing  good,  the 
supreme  historic  venture.  That,  when  we  reckon  with  all  its 
freely  accepted  elements,  is  what  it  amounts  to. 

What,  by  fair  human  view,  was  the  special  outfit  of  Jesus 
for  such  a  venture  as  this?  I  am  not  referring  now  to  the 
endowments  that  connected  Him  with  His  nation  and  its  af- 
fairs—  His  advantages  of  residence,  education,  occupation, 
position  in  society;  —  these,  in  the  large,  we  have  fully  in 
mind,  and  know  that  they  created  so  little  distinction  for  Him 
that  even  a  near-by  neighbor  exclaimed,  "Can  any  good  thing 


1 86  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

come  out  of  Nazareth?"  He  owed  as  little  to  environment  as 
does  any  common  man.  What  I  refer  to  rather  is  the  endow- 
ment that  connects  Him  with  the  unseen,  and  with  the  tide  of 
new  life  that  was  waiting  only  for  such  venture  to  break  forth 
and  flood  the  world.  We  look  perhaps  for  some  super-eminent 
saintliness,  or  eloquence,  or  sense  of  leadership;  but  these  it 
was  not,  and  the  still  unsaved  world  had  always  had  these. 
Well,  let  us  ask  John  the  Baptist;  he  as  the  authentic  embodi- 
ment of  the  old  prophetic  insight  was  entitled  to  judge;  and 
among  them  that  were  born  of  women  there  had  risen  no 
greater.  He,  you  know,  with  all  his  spiritual  aggressiveness, 
felt  his  own  limitation,  and  the  limitation  of  all  that  he  repre- 
sented; knew  that  he  was  not  the  coming  One.  He  spoke  a 
word  of  God,  but  not  the  word;  he  was  a  voice,  not  the  full- 
orbed  life;  a  keynote  and  prelude,  not  the  symphony  and 
diapason.  But  of  Jesus  he  said,  as  if  he  were  defining  a  whole 
manhood  in  Him,  "He  whom  God  hath  sent  speaketh  the 
words  of  God:  for  God  giveth  not  the  spirit  by  measure  unto 
him."  Here  we  have  the  outfit  of  Jesus:  the  spirit  without 
measure.  The  spirit  has  been  as  it  were  doled  out  before,  as 
men  could  contain  it  and  act  upon  it;  as  food  had  been  doled 
out  in  Jerusalem,  according  to  EzekieFs  prophecy,  when  men 
ate  bread  by  weight  and  with  care,  and  drank  water  by  meas- 
ure and  with  astonishment.  Here  at  last  was  a  Man  who  had 
opened  all  His  being  to  the  influx  of  the  spirit,  and  so  had 
become  a  pure  initiative  and  imparter  of  life ;  could  let  himself 
go,  abandoned  as  it  were  to  the  current  of  being  within  Him. 
And  the  consciousness  in  which  He  could  do  this  was  just  the 
simple  consciousness  of  being  the  Son  of  God,  with  all  that 
interplay  of  love  and  power  which  inheres  therein.  "The 
Father  loveth  the  Son,"  said  the  Baptist,  "and  hath  given  all 
things  into  his  hand."  No  more  the  spirit  of  bondage,  again 
to  fear,  but  the  spirit  of  adoption,  whereby  we  cry,  Abba, 
Father.  You  see  how  many  of  the  elements  we  have  traced 
meet  here  and  are  resolved:  freedom,  adultness,  the  son's 
estate  succeeding  the  slave's,  the  manhood  majority  and  in- 
heritance succeeding  the  period  of  nonage,  the  release  from 


THE  SUPREME  HISTORIC   VENTURE      187 

tutors  and  governors.  Where  the  spirit  of  the  Lord  is,  there 
is  liberty;  and  where  the  spirit  is  without  measure  there  is 
the  mighty  pioneer  outfit,  the  impulse  for  the  supreme  his- 
toric venture.  Simple  and  obvious  it  is,  when  we  see  it,  but 
tremendous. 

This  word  venture  is  just  another  name  for  faith.  That, 
you  know,  is  how  I  have  defined  faith:  a  venture  of  the  will 
and  life  on  a  course  which,  by  worldly  and  pagan  view,  with 
all  its  hedging  and  caution,  is  just  as  unreasonable  as  it  can 
be.  He  was  bearing  His  full  weight,  and  without  reservation, 
on  life  as  He  saw  it;  in  the  conviction  that  manhood  life  is 
from  God  and  of  God.  To  venture  thus  was  to  work  that  life 
out  in  the  dues  and  duties  that  come  to  Him,  high  or  lowly; 
to  wreak  Himself  on  life  as  a  man  of  men,  not  merely  as  a 
Jew,  or  a  king,  or  a  priest,  or  a  prophet;  to  work  out  its  com- 
mon details  and  teach  men  so,  sharing  life  with  them.  No 
small  thing  this,  as  a  pioneer  thing,  naturalizing  a  standard  of 
life  unheard  of  before.  Can  we  call  such  simple  faith  as  this 
anything  short  of  heroic? 

Now  this  venture,  fitting  accurately  as  it  does  into  the 
Bible  scheme  of  higher  evolution,  has  its  scientific  significance, 
no  less  than  its  religious.  It  focuses  our  attention  on  a  work 
big  with  results  for  all  the  world  and  all  life,  present  and  to 
come.  On  its  immensely  larger  scale  it  has  all  the  marks 
of  penetrative  wisdom,  keen  testing,  verification,  choice  of 
practical  agencies,  which  we  associate  with  such  men  as  Koch 
and  Pasteur,  as  in  their  quiet  laboratories  they  devise  means 
for  the  healing  and  happiness  of  men.  Nazareth  and  Caper- 
naum, the  wilderness  and  the  Holy  City,  in  those  years  30  to 
33,  are  a  world  laboratory;  and  .the  eyes  of  God  and  angels 
are  fixed  on  the  patient  but  mighty  research  that  is  going  on 
there,  the  exploration  of  the  evolutionary  secrets  and  healthful 
remedies  of  life.  And  that  life  of  Jesus,  we  say  it  though 
with  reverence  as  literally  as  we  would  of  any  study  what- 
ever, is  the  most  colossal  scientific  experiment  that  the  world 
has  ever  seen.  This  I  say  is  literal  matter  of  fact;  we  have 
only  to  project  it  on  its  cosmic  background  and  its  evolution- 


1 88  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

ary  setting  to  see  it  so.  The  experiment  was  made  in  a 
remote  corner  of  the  world;  but  that  does  not  matter;  our 
laboratories  are  all  remote  from  the  crowds  of  men,  and  no 
palatial  structures.  It  was  made  by  a  humble,  unobtrusive 
villager;  but  that  does  not  matter;  we  did  not  know  Koch 
and  Pasteur  until  their  deeds  made  them  great.  And  if  it  was 
well  and  thoroughly  made  it  was  made  once  for  all;  it  need 
not  be  repeated  or  corrected;  it  needs  only  to  be  utilized 
and  naturalized,  in  the  fulness  that  all  we  have  received  of 
Him,  and  grace  for  grace.  As  matter  of  fact,  the  world  has 
no  occasion  to  demand  repetition  or  correction  of  it;  they 
could  not  conceive  how  to  add  truer  vital  elements  to  it;  and 
they  are  still  far,  very  far,  from  having  exhausted  its  bene- 
fits. The  experiment  has  abundantly  proved,  and  is  increas- 
ingly proving,  its  entire  success;  and  men  have  crowned  Jesus 
not  only  Saviour  and  King,  but  the  supreme  scientific  evolu- 
tionist of  the  ages. 

That  whole-souled  venture  of  His,  that  pioneer  experiment, 
has  also  its  literary  bearing;  for  literature,  you  know,  is  just 
the  getting  of  the  spirit  of  manhood  into  illuminative  words. 
The  designation  that  comes  to  be  given  to  Him  is  an  essen- 
tially literary  one:  the  Word  who  was  with  God;  the  expres- 
sion of  God's  idea  to  men,  and  of  man's  idea  of  his  holiest 
manhood.  "Wherefore,"  says  a  scripture  writer,  "wherefore, 
holy  brethren,  partakers  of  the  heavenly  calling,  consider  the 
Apostle  and  High  Priest  of  our  profession,  Christ  Jesus." 
That  is  what,  in  various  phases  and  involvements,  with  applica- 
tions great  and  small,  in  many  lights  broken  or  crude  or  pure, 
the  world  of  men  has  been  doing  ever  since  —  considering1 
Christ  and  getting  education  from  it.  The  Apostle  —  one 
sent  forth  from  the  presence  of  the  Father  of  spirits;  there- 
fore God's  representative  and  ambassador  to  men;  and  to  this 
day  men  have  not  found  or  desired  a  representative  more 
answering  to  their  highest  conception.  The  High  Priest  — 
who  stands  between  men  and  God,  to  voice  their  prayers  and 
embody  what  they  would  fain  be;  who  thus  is  the  representa- 
tive and  spokesman  of  men  to  God;  and  to  this  day  men  have 


THE  SUPREME  HISTORIC  VENTURE      189 

neither  sought  nor  desired  to  be  better  represented.  So  far 
forth  the  word,  the  idea,  is  finished.  This  we  know  because 
Messianism  as  a  prophecy,  that  prophecy  of  a  coming  Man 
which  once  focussed  the  hopes  of  the  world,  has  disappeared, 
its  complete  fulfilment  being  taken  for  granted.  But  the 
Messianic  idea  is  an  idea  that  grows  for  ever;  its  involvements, 
its  perennial  applications  to  life,  are  never  finished.  It  still 
has  its  prophetic  pulsation,  greater  than  ever;  only  the  ictus 
of  it  has  changed;  not  the  coming  man  now,  but  the  coming 
life.  In  two  directions  this  idea  is  working,  intensively  and 
extensively;  the  direction  of  its  depth,  and  the  direction  of 
its  breadth;  in  other  words,  the  prophetic  soul  of  the  world 
is  asking,  on  the  one  hand,  What  shall  become  of  the  indi- 
vidual? and  on  the  other,  What  shall  become  of  the  race,  of 
society?  Just  now  this  latter  inquiry  has  the  floor;  and  so 
predominantly  that  for  the  moment  it  seems  to  fill  the  horizon. 
Questions  of  social  betterment  and  of  the  massing  and  mu- 
tualization  of  large  human  interests  —  how  to  regulate  capi- 
tal and  labor  and  rates  and  commerce  and  industry  and  edu- 
cation, how,  in  a  word,  to  make  the  vast  social  organism  what 
it  should  be  —  are  the  overwhelming  burden  and  pain  of  the 
age,  like  an  uneasy  obsession.  And  meanwhile  the  question  of 
individual  salvation  has  quite  passed  into  eclipse;  and  men 
have  almost  ceased  to  inquire  or  care  about  personal  immor- 
tality, except  here  and  there  in  vague  psychic  research  and 
spiritualism,  —  as  if  immortality  could  lie  in  that  unsavory 
direction !  The  most  of  men  don't  want  it,  if  that  is  all  there 
is  to  it;  they  would  rather  save  their  interests  for  something 
of  real  uplift  and  importance.  Well,  the  situation  has  its 
noble  features;  noble,  and  eminently  wholesome.  We  think 
infinitely  more  of  a  man  who  is  toiling  and  studying  to  regen- 
erate his  fellow-men  and  to  make  the  corporate  life  more 
livable,  than  of  a  man  who,  like  a  miser  with  his  gold,  is 
scheming  how  to  evade  the  fire  and  secure  safety  for  his  own 
measly  greedy  little  soul.  Yes:  we  have  no  occasion  for  pes- 
simism about  the  race  so  long  as  the  hunger  to  be  saviours  and 
benefactors  so  pervasively  possesses  the  souls  of  men.  But 


190  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

just  here  it  will  pay  us  to  release  ourselves  a  little  from  this 
sociological  obsession,  and  return  to  the  question  of  the  indi- 
vidual. After  all,  the  individual,  our  individual  personality, 
has  the  first  claim.  We  make  a  grievous  mistake  if  we  think 
that  mankind  is  to  be  saved  in  a  lump;  nay,  the  undeniable 
good  that  we  can  bring  to  them  in  a  lump,  by  legislation  or 
sentiment  or  public  benefaction,  is  only  good  of  a  lower  and 
material  kind,  such  as  expresses  itself  in  terms  of  comfort 
and  ease  and  wealth  and  general  externalism.  And  our  return 
to  the  intensive  side  of  our  prophecy,  to  the  individual  life  with 
its  ideal  endowment  of  freedom  and  independence,  does  not 
quench  but  rather  intensifies  our  impulse  to  promote  such  good 
as  this  in  the  world.  It  is  indeed  the  one  true  spring  of  it. 
Christ,  the  unique  individual,  is  by  that  very  rounded  fulness 
of  individuality  the  representative  of  the  living  God,  "who," 
as  St.  Paul  says,  "is  the  Saviour  of  all  men,  specially  of  those 
that  believe."  His  great  venture  of  love  and  faith  began  with 
the  neighbors  at  His  side,  with  the  villagers  of  Galilee,  and 
His  cousins  by  the  lake-side,  and  the  sick  who  gravitated  to 
Him  in  their  feebleness;  and  He  helped  them  not  merely  by 
healing,  or  by  preaching  better  wages  and  shorter  hours,  but 
by  giving  each  man  of  them  a  new  idea  to  live  by.  His  venture 
was  directed  to  making  regenerate  individuals  of  them;  and 
he  left  the  rest,  the  social  betterment,  to  follow  by  natural  con- 
sequence, by  their  own  individual  motion. 

We  did  well  to  dismiss  our  care  for  immortality,  so  long  as 
it  was  merely  a  refined  dream  of  greed,  or  a  question  of  going 
to  heaven  when  we  die.  For  if  personal  immortality  is  any- 
thing, it  is  the  polar  opposite  of  this;  it  belongs,  as  we  have 
seen,  to  the  outward  and  love-current  of  life,  not  to  the  inward 
and  selfish  one.  This  is  the  truth  that  Christ  came  to  estab- 
lish, when  He  brought  life  and  immortality  to  light.  But  His 
immortality,  you  see,  is  not  revealed  as  a  thing  to  work  for  at 
all.  It  does  not  come  as  wages,  or  reward,  or  even  as  rest.  It 
does  not  contemplate  that  we  should  get  tired  of  what  we  are 
doing  now,  so  as  to  need  rest;  or  ashamed  of  it,  so  as  to  need 
a  change  and  a  kind  of  cleaning  up.  It  is,  in  fact,  merely  an 


THE  SUPREME  HISTORIC   VENTURE      191 

incident  of  life,  which,  with  the  spirit  of  life  in  control,  we  can 
leave  to  take  care  of  itself.  To  take  thought  for  immortality, 
in  this  narrow  sense  of  personal  safety,  is  not  of  the  idiom  of 
that  faith  which  we  are  now  defining  as  a  disinterested  venture 
of  life.  One  of  the  most  salient  elements  in  this  historic  ven- 
ture of  Jesus  was  His  magnificent  disregard  of  what  would  be- 
come of  Him  as  the  sequel  of  His  chosen  work.  He  might  be 
revered  as  divine,  He  might  be  scorned  and  put  to  death;  it 
was  all  the  same,  so  far  as  the  integrity  and  thoroughness  of 
the  work  were  concerned.  This  feature  of  his  life  is  what  St. 
Paul  honors  in  his  idea  of  the  KeWcris,  or  self-emptying, 
of  Christ;  "who,"  he  says,  "being  in  the  form  of  God  did  not 
deem  his  equality  with  God  a  prize,  a  thing  to  be  clutched  at 
and  maintained  at  all  hazards;  but  made  himself  of  no  repu- 
tation, and  took  upon  him  the  form  of  a  servant,  and  was  made 
in  the  likeness  of  men:  and  being  found  in  fashion  as  a  man 
he  humbled  himself  and  became  obedient  unto  death,  even  the 
death  of  the  cross."  This  is  how  the  Christ-life  looks  from  the 
unseen  places,  where  the  divine  who  is  in  act  to  smite  His  na- 
ture into  manhood  is  initiating  the  movement  of  uttermost  love. 
From  the  human  side,  as  we  see  it  in  the  deeds  and  words  of 
Jesus  of  Nazareth,  it  has  a  simpler  look,  being  translated  into 
the  present- world  idiom;  but  its  principle  is  the  same,  its 
primal  impulse  is  identical,  starting  as  it  does  away  inward  in 
that  sacred  withdrawn  centre  where  the  spirit  of  God  is  wit- 
nessing with  the  spirit  of  man.  In  this  manhood  idiom  it  is 
simply  taking  outward  consequences,  of  humility  and  hardship 
and  scorn,  as  all  in  the  day's  work,  all  inherent  in  the  strange 
new  venture,  but  never  availing  for  a  moment  to  warp  the 
spirit  from  its  divinely  plotted  orbit.  The  truest  and  strongest 
elements  of  the  human,  the  seeing  eye  and  the  stedfast  will, 
are  as  inherent  in  it  as  is  the  mystic  divine.  And  we,  as  emu- 
lators of  that  same  self -forgetting  faith,  are  nearer  to  it  when, 
seeing  it  truly,  we  just  let  ourselves  go,  as  it  were  instinctively, 
on  the  limitless  current  of  love  and  faith,  regardless  of  the  un- 
toward things  we  thereby  incur,  than  when  we  are  nervously 
apprehensive  about  heaven  and  hell.  Every  stop  that  we  make 


192  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

to  count  our  personal  chances  of  ultimate  safety  or  reward  is 
essentially  a  self -limitation ;  and  love  and  faith  will  accept  no 
limitations. 

We  have  just  considered  St.  Paul's  interpretation  of  this 
self-emptying  of  Christ,  an  interpretation  made  from  a  point 
of  view  the  other  side  of  the  veil,  as  if  he  had  been  admitted 
into  the  secret  counsel  of  God.  How  do  you  suppose  he  got 
there?  There  are  many  other  such  interpretations  of  things 
in  Scripture:  the  whole  fabric  of  what  we  call  revelation  is  just 
that:  men  by  an  amazing  presumption  taking  upon  themselves 
to  assert  what  the  Spirit  of  the  universe  thinks  and  plans,  in 
His  vast  creative  work  of  evolving  a  humanity.  How  do  you 
suppose  they  got  the  other  side  of  the  veil?  We  are  not  in 
position  to  say,  it  is  presumptuous  to  say,  they  did  not  get  it 
by  an  authentic  report  from  the  unseeci  places;  and  of  one 
thing  we  may  be  sure:  they  did  not  get  it  by  psychism  and 
occultism  in  any  form;  psychism  and  occultism  do  not  bring 
that  kind  of  news.  These  are  as  earth-bound  as  we  are;  as 
earth-bound  as  is  any  casual,  vagrant  dead  fact;  for  all  the  un- 
canny facts  it  can  accumulate,  and  all  the  facts  that  historical 
research  can  verify  and  sift,  are  of  the  letter  that  killeth;  in 
themselves  they  are  not  truth,  are  not  the  spirit  of  life.  But 
we  do  not  have  to  depend  on  that  kind  of  news;  our  faith  is 
not  at  the  mercy  of  manuscripts  and  various  readings  and 
documents.  No:  if  we  have  a  report  from  the  unseen,  Christ 
Himself  is  that  report,  Christ  the  perfected  manhood;  and  the 
way  we  recognize  whether  the  report  is  authentic,  or  as  the 
scientific  jargon  puts  it,  veridical,  is  by  the  spirit  within  us, 
the  highest  and  purest  possession  we  have.  But  you  say,  How 
do  we  know  that  supreme  report  from  the  unseen  except  by 
the  words  that  have  been  written,  and  how  can  we  tell  what 
those  words  are,  except  by  sifting  and  keen  criticism,  by  which 
we  may  separate  what  actually  was  said  and  done  by  Him 
from  what  men  afterward  thought  was  said  and  done?  Here 
again  we  are  not  at  the  mercy  of  documents.  We  have  one 
unshakable  historic  fact:  the  fact  that  one  Man,  in  a  way  that 
showed  He  had  the  spirit  without  measure,  dared  to  make  the 


THE   SUPREME  HISTORIC   VENTURE      193 

supreme  venture  of  love  and  faith,  and  to  work  it  out  in  terms 
of  the  common  life.  In  this  fact  inheres  all  the  rest,  even  to 
the  end  of  time.  And  now,  ever  since  that  fact  emerged  to 
history,  the  mind  of  the  ages,  as  I  said,  has  been  considering 
the  Apostle  and  High  Priest  of  our  profession,  Christ  Jesus. 
They  began  to  consider  Him  just  as  soon  as  He  had  lived  His 
life ;  for  they  knew  by  a  secret  instinct  that  here  was  a  unique, 
a  world-filling  thing  to  consider.  They  were  dazed  and  be- 
wildered at  first;  naturally;  we  cannot  pass  the  definitive  judg- 
ment on  historic  events  while  they  are  in  progress;  our 
historians  must  have  time  to  digest  and  coordinate  and  assimi- 
late them.  So  it  was  in  the  scripture  age;  our  Gospels  did  not 
assume  their  present  shape  until  years  afterward,  some  think 
nearly  two  centuries  before  the  last  of  them  was  done.  But 
what  does  this  show?  Merely  the  inevitable  movement  of  the 
human  mind,  merely  what  all  literature  shows,  that  — 

the  past  will  always  win 

A  glory  from  its  being  far; 
And  orb  into  the  perfect  star 
We  saw  not,  when  we  mov'd  therein. 

That  is  why,  in  reviewing  this  record  of  the  Life  Indeed,  I  re- 
ject nothing.  It  is  all  a  part  of  that  literature  which  sprang 
out  of  that  one  colossal  fact;  it  is  the  effort  of  men  to  get  that 
fact  into  meaning  and  coordination;  as  Matthew  Arnold  ex- 
presses it,  it  is  language  thrown  out  toward  an  object  too  large 
to  be  fully  comprehended.  And  that  effort  has  by  no  means 
prisoned  itself  between  the  lids  of  our  Bible.  It  is  going  on 
still;  I  dare  to  say  that  what  has  made  the  poetry  and  phil- 
osophy and  fiction  of  the  ages  vital,  has  been  in  its  essence 
just  considering  Christ,  and  therefore  is  making,  in  ever-mov- 
ing discoveries  and  concepts,  an  unending  Bible.  What  matter 
if  there  are  errors  of  judgment  and  faults  of  transmission? 
These  may  be  left  to  the  mending  hand  of  time;  they  are  cor- 
rected best,  not  by  the  letter  which  always  has  the  corruptions 
of  a  thing  that  is  dead,  but  by  the  spirit  which  giveth  life.  And 
the  spirit  sends  us  back,  or  rather  inward,  to  that  supreme  fact, 


194  THE   LIFE   INDEED 

which  being  expressed  in  human  life  was  not  at  the  rude  mercy 
of  the  letter.  Jesus  wrote  nothing;  He  lived. 

And  so  the  Word  had  breath,  and  wrought 

With  human  hands  the  creed  of  creeds 

In  loveliness  of  perfect  deeds, 
More  strong  than  all  poetic  thought. 

I  confess  to  something  very  like  reverence  to  the  great,  surg- 
ing, unwieldy,  yet  desperately  earnest  body  of  human  litera- 
ture; the  voice  of  their  poetic  and  prophetic  spirit  always 
making  itself  heard;  I  can  enter  into  the  feeling  that  Jesus 
had  in  the  wilderness  when  to  every  suggestion  of  the  Tempter 
He  responded,  "It  is  written."  I  think  we  do  ill  to  limit  or 
confine  its  multifarious  utterance,  except  as  we  judge  it  by 
the  mighty  spirit  of  life.  I  have  been  struck  by  a  remark  in 
Sabatier's  "Life  of  St.  Francis  of  Assisi,"  who  of  all  saints  is 
by  many  deemed  to  have  been  most  like  Christ;  the  author 
says:  "Only  a  profoundly  religious  and  poetic  soul  (is  not  the 
one  the  other?)  can  understand."  Is  not  the  one  the  other? 
I  ask  of  the  thoughts  and  images  that  come  to  me  in  literature. 
And  when  I  read  a  book  like  Professor  Schmidt's  recent  work 
"The  Prophet  of  Nazareth,"  and  see  how  he  labors  to  show 
that  none  of  the  prophecies  meant  Christ,  and  none  of  the 
types  meant  Christlike  things,  and  the  term  Son  of  man  only 
meant  this  little  thing,  and  the  term  Son  of  God  must  be 
whittled  down  to  this  other,  —  as  if  it  were  essential  to  our 
view  of  truth  that  we  reduce  everything  to  lowest  factual  terms 
and  sail  as  it  were  under  bare  poles,  —  I  feel  that  I  am  asked 
to  give  up  the  thought  of  the  ages,  the  words  in  which  unwit- 
tingly men  from  the  beginning  have  been  helping  Christ  to 
live.  We  make  nothing  by  this;  we  lose  unspeakably.  The 
world's  interpretation  of  Christ  will  not  bear  limitation;  it  is 
growing  all  the  while.  Why,  this  view  of  Him  in  the  cosmic 
and  evolutionary  reference,  which  men  are  trying  to  portray 
in  scientific  terms,  is  a  product  of  our  very  latest  time.  But 
is  it  any  less  likely  to  be  true?  For  it  foots  itself  squarely  on 
this  colossal  world  fact,  this  supreme  historic  venture. 

So  the  world  is  still  recording  the  meanings  of  that  experi- 


THE   SUPREME  HISTORIC   VENTURE      195 

ment  in  life ;  and  their  record,  in  spite  of  mistakes  and  vagaries 
and  aberrations,  is  like  a  steady  voyage  of  discovery.  The  cry 
"Back  to  Christ"  is  all  very  well,  as  a  return  for  orders  to 
headquarters;  but  it  will  not  do  to  make  it  an  occasion  for 
narrowing  or  belittling  the  Christ  idea;  rather,  with  the  spirit 
of  that  initial  venture  in  mind,  let  the  watchword  be,  "Forward, 
ever  forward,  to  the  Christ  that  is  to  be."  For  that  historic 
venture  was  only  a  beginning,  an  opening  of  the  gates;  and 
the  end  is  not  yet. 

In  a  summarizing  word  we  may  say:  As  the  lower  evolution, 
which  has  to  do  with  the  life  of  the  body,  finds  its  norms  and 
types  in  the  species ;  so  this  higher  and  conscious  evolution,  in 
which  the  spirit  cooperates,  and  which  therefore  tends  ever 
from  the  fettered  species  to  the  free  individual,  has  developed 
its  supreme  spiritual  type  in  one  Man;  who  now,  as  perfected 
personality,  embodies  the  life  to  which  all  manhood  life  is 
organically  related,  the  foundation  other  than  which  no  man 
can  lay;  and  the  love  and  faith  which  characterize  the  com- 
pleted ideal  are  the  vital  pulsation  in  which  alone,  henceforth, 
manhood  achieves  its  rest,  its  fulness,  its  joy.  In  this  Man, 
as  He  stands  unique  and  towering,  it  is  impossible  to  say  which 
is  more  evident:  His  manifoldness  of  human  relation,  or  His 
utter  singleness  of  motive  and  aim;  His  individual  remoteness 
from  all,  or  His  universal  intimateness  with  all.  Is  not  this 
the  mark  of  the  type?  It  takes  away  the  future  tense  from 
that  verse  of  Isaiah's,  making  it  present: 

A  man  shall  be  as  an  hiding  place  from  the  wind, 

And  a  covert  from  the  tempest; 

As  rivers  of  water  in  a  dry  place, 

As  the  shadow  of  a  great  rock  in  a  weary  land. 

But  whatever  more  we  recognize  in  Him,  this  much  we  may 
say,  in  a  more  pregnant  application  of  Shakespeare's  words :  — 

His  life  was  gentle;  and  the  elements 

So  mix'd  in  him  that  Nature  might  stand  up, 

And  say  to  all  the  world,  "This  was  a  man!" 

These  words  were  said,  you  know,  of  that  noble  Roman  Bru- 
tus; but  Brutus'  nobleness  was  obscured  at  one  point;  he  got 


196  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

entangled  in  a  conspiracy,  and  yielded  part  of  his  soul  to  evil 
counsel,  and  went  under.  This  Man  trod  the  wine-press  alone, 
and  of  the  people  there  was  none  with  Him.  To  be  a  man: 
that  was  the  quest  for  the  sake  of  which  He  laid  aside  His 
divine  claim.  Alone  He  ventured  forth;  alone  He  traversed 
the  whole  consistent,  heroic  way;  alone  He  passed  out  of  our 
sight.  Where  would  we  be,  what  our  way  of  life,  what  our 
hope,  if  at  any  point  He  had  flinched  or  failed?  The  question 
opens  for  the  whole  world  an  alternative  too  awful  to  face. 

I.      FROM     THE    EXCEEDING    HIGH    MOUNTAIN 

His  kinsmen,  you  remember,  when  they  saw  how  His  min- 
istry was  going,  tried  to  lay  hold  on  Him,  saying,  "He  is  be- 
side himself";  and  many  of  the  Jews,  when  they  listened  to 
His  interpretations  of  life,  said,  "He  hath  a  devil,  and  is  mad; 
why  hear  ye  him?"  Such  were  among  the  things  He  had  to 
encounter.  It  is  our  business  to-day  to  inquire  what  method 
there  was  in  His  madness ;  in  other  words,  whether  this  strange 
unique  life  of  His  was  a  thing  into  which  He  drifted  as  it  were 
by  accident,  and  then  found  later  that  He  was  so  committed 
that  He  could  not  consistently  withdraw,  or  whether  from  the 
beginning  it  obeyed  a  plan,  a  foreseen  determination,  and  all 
along  bore  the  fruit  that  belongs  to  its  kind.  Astounding  as 
it  was  to  all,  not  all  judged  it  as  madness;  to  some  it  openect 
a  dim  vision  of  something  transcendently  great  and  beneficent, 
they  could  hardly  divine  what.  "These  are  not  the  words  of 
him  that  hath  a  devil.  Can  a  devil  open  the  eyes  of  the  blind?" 
Some  there  were,  then,  who  were  trying  to  pass  upon  His  life 
of  the  spirit  the  common-sense  judgment  of  effects,  though  the 
mystery  of  the  cause  stretched  far  beyond  their  ken;  just  as 
He  Himself  had  said  to  Nicodemus,  "The  wind  bloweth  where 
it  listeth,  and  thou  hearest  the  sound  thereof,  but  canst  not 
tell  whence  it  cometh  or  whither  it  goeth;  so  is  everyone  that 
is  born  of  the  spirit."  In  Him  the  great  free  atmosphere  of 
the  spirit  was  stirring  in  the  world,  the  breath  of  another  and 
higher  world;  and  from  the  effects  of  it  which  they  could  see, 


THE  SUPREME  HISTORIC   VENTURE      197 

its  contact  with  their  lower  life,  they  were  gradually,  according 
to  their  fairness  and  openness  of  spirit,  to  judge  of  its  inner 
nature,  which  they  could  not  see.  By  their  fruits  ye  shall  know 
them. 

But  to  begin  with,  we  have  before  us  just  such  a  thing  as 
we  see  everyday,  just  such  as  everyone  of  us  has  by  experience 
to  meet  and  solve:  namely,  a  young  man,  with  a  young  man's 
hopes  and  energies,  setting  out  upon  life  and  livelihood.  To 
Him,  as  to  us,  the  alternative  that  rose  before  Him  was  capable 
of  a  very  simple  reduction:  which  shall  it  be,  life  first  and 
livelihood  incidental,  or  livelihood  first  and  life  the  incident, 
the  uncared-for  thing?  All  depended,  with  Him  as  with  us, 
upon  the  spirit  that  animated  Him.  To  make  its  significance 
more  real,  let  us  put  beside  it  Carlyle's  account  of  his  young 
contemporary,  John  Sterling:  "Here,  then,"  he  says,  "is  a 
young  soul  brought  to  the  years  of  legal  majority,  furnished 
from  his  training-schools  with  such  and  such  shining  capa- 
bilities, and  ushered  on  the  scene  of  things,  to  inquire  practi- 
cally, What  he  will  do  there?  Piety  is  in  the  man,  noble 
human  valor,  bright  intelligence,  ardent  proud  veracity;  light 
and  fire,  in  none  of  their  many  senses,  wanting  for  him,  but 
abundantly  bestowed:  a  kingly  kind  of  man;  — whose  'king- 
dom,' however,  in  this  bewildered  place  and  epoch  of  the  world, 
will  probably  be  difficult  to  find  and  conquer ! "  You  remember 
how,  in  thus  starting  his  hero  forth,  Carlyle  makes  assessment 
of  various  pursuits  and  professions:  divinity,  law,  medicine, 
public  life;  only  to  find  that  none  quite  suited  his  aptitude, 
except  "the  anarchic,  nomadic,  entirely  aerial  and  uncondi- 
tional one,  called  Literature."  He,  too,  then,  like  his  great 
Prototype,  had  the  controlling  bent  to  be  a  word  to  the  world, 
to  coin  his  life  into  expression;  and  if  we  had  time  to  follow  him 
we  should  find,  as  we  find  universally  of  men,  that  the  success 
of  his  impact  on  the  world  depended  upon  the  largeness  of  the 
life  and  the  fulness  and  beauty  of  the  expression. 

I  have  chosen  this  case  to  set  by  the  side  of  ours,  that  we 
might  have  a  kind  of  unit  to  measure  by.  The  earthly  con- 
ditions, not  greatly  different,  were  if  anything  in  Sterling's 


i98  THE   LIFE  INDEED 

favor.  He  was  finely  trained  and  cultured;  but  he  had  no 
profession  and  was  casting  about  for  one  that  would  suit  his 
temperament.  Our  Lord  already  had  a  means  of  livelihood, 
the  carpenter's  trade;  but  He  gave  it  up,  and  did  not  work  at 
it  any  more;  it  afforded  obviously  too  narrow  a  vocabulary 
in  itself,  to  fill  out  the  expression  of  the  life  that  was  in  Him. 
His  giving  it  up,  however,  cast  no  slur  on  that  or  any  other 
trade;  rather  it  left  them  all  glorified,  while  he  passed  beyond 
questions  of  livelihood  to  seek  first  the  kingdom  of  God  and 
His  righteousness.  And  here  begins  His  vast  differentiation 
from  men;  so  great  that  it  seems  almost  profane  to  set  any 
other  man  by  the  side  of  Him.  Yet  it  was  no  differentiation 
that  He  sought;  it  all  came  about  rather  by  His  single-minded 
determination,  incidents  and  accidents  of  life  ignored,  to  in- 
carnate that  essential  vital  principle  wherein  He  could  stand 
as  a  brother  by  the  side  of  every  man.  No  one  had  ever  made 
this  determination  before;  no  one,  before  or  since,  even  with 
His  spirit  to  help,  has  made  it  to  such  purpose.  There  is  a 
strange  universality  of  appeal  and  relation  to  reckon  with  here; 
we  canot  account  for  it  all,  nor  for  the  vital  part  of  it,  by  say- 
ing that  in  the  reign  of  Tiberius  a  young  carpenter  of  Galilee 
resolved  to  be  very  good  and  carried  out  his  resolve  consist- 
ently. This  is  about  what  it  amounts  to,  if  we  regard  Him 
merely  as  a  man  among  men;  even  reckoning  the  wise  things 
He  said,  and  the  death  He  died.  Rather,  somehow  His  person- 
ality overshadows  us  as  that  of  the  man  we  would  all  be,  as 
the  type  of  complete  manhood  which  all  that  is  holiest  in  us 
is  struggling  to  realize.  Here  is  the  phenomenon  to  resolve: 
the  fact  that  this  Man's  personality  is  the  touchstone  of  hearts. 
As  Napoleon  Bonaparte  is  reported  to  have  said:  "Jesus 
Christ  has  succeeded  in  making  of  every  human  soul  an  ap- 
pendage of  His  own." 

I  am  led  to  these  remarks  by  the  thought  of  Professor 
Schmidt's  book,  "The  Prophet  of  Nazareth."  It  is  one  of 
those  books  of  which  the  coming  few  years  are  likely  to  see 
a  considerable  crop;  for  you  know  Biblical  criticism  is  shift- 
ing its  ground  now  from  the  Old  Testament  to  the  New,  and 


THE  SUPREME  HISTORIC   VENTURE      199 

its  austere  historic  method  is  going  to  sift  the  records  as  they 
have  never  been  sifted  before.  I  tell  you  this  that  you  may 
not  be  unprepared  when  it  comes;  also  to  record  here  my  con- 
viction that  the  historic  method  itself  —  as  exclusive  matter- 
of-fact  research  I  mean  —  is  on  its  last  legs,  and  that  its  sting 
is  in  its  tail.  It  must  give  place  to  something  more  genial  and 
constructive.  The  book  I  mention  will  prove,  I  think,  to  be 
one  of  the  ablest  of  these  investigations ;  as  it  certainly  is  about 
as  sweeping  and  radical  as  it  can  be.  Here  we  have  about  the 
utmost  that  a  rigid,  purely  factual,  unimaginative  criticism  can 
do.  I  respect  the  book,  with  all  its  relentless  rakings  from  the 
German  workshops,  far  more  than  I  do  these  touch-and-go 
books  that  will  soon  take  occasion  from  it  to  scatter  fire-brands 
of  raw  second-hand  assertion,  or  sparks  of  ad  captandum 
superficial  reply,  saying,  "Lo  here,  lo  there!"  Its  object,  on 
its  factual  scale,  is  to  reduce  the  life  of  Jesus  to  lowest  his- 
toric terms,  to  an  irreducible  minimum;  and  this  by  disen- 
gaging from  the  gospel  record  all  that  it  deems  the  fondness  of 
disciples,  or  the  looseness  of  tradition,  or  the  interpretations 
of  poetry  and  theology,  have,  during  the  succeeding  ages  added 
to  it.  The  Gospels,  you  know,  did  not  reach  their  present 
shape  until  many  years  after  the  ministry  was  done;  and  books 
like  this  look  upon  the  intervening  years  as  a  sort  of  run-wild 
garden  plot,  out  of  which  it  is  concerned  to  pull  the  too  luxuri- 
ant growth  of  weeds.  Its  excisions  are  startlingly  radical.  It 
rejects  the  fourth  Gospel  altogether;  leaves  out  virtually  all 
that  precedes  the  beginning  of  the  ministry,  all  that  follows 
the  crucifixion  and  burial,  and  all  the  miracles  except  a  few 
doubtful  cases  of  mind-cure;  and  almost  totally  ignores  the 
Epistles  of  Paul.  So  the  Jesus  it  would  leave  us  is  about  what 
a  man  in  the  street,  with  a  head  for  nothing  but  sense-per- 
ception, would  see  from  the  outside,  and  would  report  as  men 
report  a  street-fight,  saying  just  this  and  that,  without  any 
varnish  or  frills,  is  what  occurred.  And  the  writer  apparently 
takes  comfort  in  the  thought  that  he  has  got  down  to  literal 
bed-rock;  which  in  his  view  is,  that  Jesus  neither  professed  to 
be,  nor  was,  anything  more  than  a  wise  and  well-disposed 


200  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

prophet,  whose  life  was  remarkably  sincere,  and  whose  views 
of  life  were  so  astonishingly  correct,  even  by  our  present  com- 
plex standards,  that  they  are  worthy  of  a  fuller  confidence  and 
application  than  civilization  or  the  churches  have  ever  ac- 
corded to  them.  All  this  Jesus  certainly  was;  we  can  go  with 
the  writer  so  far,  and  still  have  the  richest  legacy  of  the  ages. 
But  I  confess  I  am  suspicious  of  every  man  and  every  method 
that  sets  up  an  arbitrary  limit  and  says  "No thing  but."  And 
when  I  see  that  "nothing  but"  applied  to  the  life  of  Christ  — 
when  I  measure  it  up  and  ask  "Is  that  all?"  —  forthwith  there 
rise  to  my  thought  many  vital  elements  of  being,  many  strands 
of  life  even  in  my  poor  ideal,  to  which  this  frigid  criticism  is 
blind.  It  is  not  on  the  Christ  scale;  not  even  on  the  scale  of 
inner  creative  history;  but  only  that  of  newspaper  journalism 
and  courts  of  law.  All  that  makes  the  life  of  Christ  perennial, 
a  present  power  and  pulsation,  has  evaporated;  leaving  only 
a  few  stray  annals  of  ancient  story,  and  a  few  precepts  to 
learn  by  rote. 

Now  I  am  not  concerned  to  refute  this  book,  or  to  warn 
against  the  danger  of  it.  That  is  why  I  am  so  free  to  call  at- 
tention to  it.  If  it  has  found  the  irreducible  minimum  of  fact, 
let  us  be  glad;  for  there  is  no  danger  in  authentic  fact.  The 
Bible  itself  invites  the  scrutiny  of  facts;  we  have  not  followed 
cunningly  devised  fables.  But  there  are  facts  and  facts;  and 
on  top  of  all  this  external  history  there  is  this  larger  fact  to 
be  reckoned  with,  that  from  Jesus'  day  to  this  the  world  has 
not  been  able  to  look  at  His  life  cold-bloodedly.  That  life  lays 
hold  on  men;  it  enkindles  their  hearts,  gives  them  peace  and 
joy  and  energy  and  a  sense  of  solved  existence,  —  why?  Then 
forthwith  there  spring  up  all  around  it,  like  a  springtide  luxuri- 
ance, art  and  poetry  and  vitalized  thinking,  —  why?  Then 
we  become  aware  of  a  vast  new  movement  of  the  spirit  of  man, 
all  tracing  back  directly  to  that  life,  as  to  a  mighty  seminal 
impulse  and  power,  —  why?  A  mere  villager  who  has  left  his 
carpenter's  bench  to  become  a  self-made  prophet  has  no  busi- 
ness, it  would  seem,  to  figure  like  that  in  history;  if  he  has, 
and  if  this  paltry  fact  accounts  for  him,  what  has  become  of 


THE  SUPREME  HISTORIC  VENTURE      201 

all  the  prophets  who  have  done  similar  things?  This  is  a  world 
of  law;  and  like  causes  ought  to  produce  like  effects  every- 
where. And  if  Jesus  so  figures  in  history  not  by  virtue  of  what 
He  was  and  did  but  by  virtue  of  the  halo  with  which  others 
have  invested  Him,  how  resolve  the  halo?  Did  it  take  other 
minds,  then,  to  piece  His  out  and  make  a  Christ  of  Him?  And 
if  so,  where  do  we  find  the  real  Christ  nucleus,  in  A.D.  30  or 
some  vague  time  in  the  second  century?  If  we  must  throw 
away  the  Gospel  of  John  in  order  to  get  the  authentic  Jesus, 
I  submit  the  serious  question  rises  whether  it  wouldn't  be 
better  to  throw  away  the  history-shorn  Jesus  and  keep  the 
Gospel  of  John.  For  somehow  a  Christ,  the  recognized 
summit  of  manhood  —  not  a  mere  carpenter-itinerant  —  has 
out  of  the  nebula  of  history  orbed  into  concrete  being,  and  be- 
come the  greatest  theme  of  literature  and  life.  Did  that  Christ 
live,  with  the  supreme  manhood  in  Him  from  the  first,  or  did 
a  company  of  poets  and  fictionists  create  Him  out  of  a  Jew? 
If  the  latter,  then  must  we  dismiss  Jesus  and  put  our  faith  in 
poetry  and  fiction?  We  might  do  worse.  I  am  not  sure  but 
we  would  do  worse,  by  cramping  our  faith  down  to  the  sight 
of  the  eyes,  to  a  casual  fact  seen  only  from  the  outside.  There 
is  in  these  more  of  the  spirit  which  giveth  life  than  there  is  in 
a  congealed  external  letter  which  killeth.  And  if  we  insist  on 
reporting  this  majestic  Christ  phenomenon  as  one  would  a 
street-fight,  we  abjure  all  our  heritage  in  the  loving,  creative, 
assimilative  mind  of  the  ages  which  forthwith  made  all  the 
Christ  events  its  own,  and  quickened  its  holiest  ideals  by  them, 
seeing  in  them  not  only  the  fact  but  the  eternal  truth  without 
which  facts  are  nugatory. 

I  seem  here  to  have  made  a  long  digression;  but  by  the 
scale  on  which  we  are  thinking  I  have  not.  For  it  all  belongs 
to  the  answer  we  must  needs  give  here  to  the  question  which 
our  Lord  himself  put,  "What  think  ye  of  Christ?  Whose  son 
is  he?"  This,  in  scripture  terminology,  is  really  the  crux  of 
our  inquiry.  Our  foregoing  investigation,  following  the  higher 
evolution  of  spirit  up  to  the  law  of  the  spirit  of  life,  with  its 
supreme  instinct  of  love  and  faith,  has  brought  us  up  to  the 


202  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

point  where  this  answer  is  the  next  thing  in  order.  Shall  it 
be  a  petty  answer,  from  the  outside,  or  shall  it,  from  the  inside, 
be  large  and  roomy?  In  other  words,  it  is  time  now  to  pro- 
ject our  view  of  Jesus  of  Nazareth  on  the  background  of  the 
ideal  of  life  which  somehow  a  long  line  of  manhood  striving 
has  evolved.  Does  He  stand  the  test,  or  look  we  for  another? 
He  Himself  puts  the  question,  offering  Himself  thus  as  a  candi- 
date, whom  we,  according  to  our  insight,  are  free  to  take  or 
leave.  Nothing  could  be  fairer  or  more  above  board.  He  calls 
himself  the  Son  of  man;  He  arrogates  nothing  higher,  and  even 
this  term  He  uses  in  a  theoretical  way,  not  as  a  personal  title, 
but  as  a  means  of  defining  what,  in  this  case  and  that,  the  Son 
of  man  would  naturally  be  and  do.  Thus  by  His  very  use  of 
the  term  He  is  demonstrating,  point  by  point,  His  conception 
of  manhood  life  and  character.  Men  ask  Him  in  bewilder- 
ment, "Who  is  this  Son  of  man?"  and  He  only  refers  them  to 
the  light  that  is  with  them,  by  which  they  may  judge  for  them- 
selves, and  ought  to  make  up  their  minds  in  the  little  while 
that  the  light  is  with  them.  Some  ardent  souls  like  Nathanael 
carry  their  insight  further,  and  say,  "Thou  art  the  Son  of  God; 
thou  art  the  King  of  Israel";  but  this  is  not  His  assumption, 
it  is  their  inner  recognition;  they  come  to  see  that  He  answers 
their  conception  of  what  the  Son  of  God  would  be  like.  Once 
indeed  He  is  reported  to  have  asked  a  man  whose  eyes  He  has 
opened,  "Dost  thou  believe  on  the  Son  of  God?"  and  when 
the  man  asked,  "Who  is  he,  Lord,  that  I  might  believe  on 
him?"  He  answered,  "Thou  hast  both  seen  him,  and  it  is  he 
that  talketh  with  thee."  But  this  is  not  an  arrogation;  it  is 
a  revelation  to  one  whose  opened  eyes  and  heart  are  ready  for 
it,  one  who  has  become  like  Nathanael. 

The  Son  of  man,  the  Son  of  God,  —  what  shall  we  make  ot 
these  terms?  Professor  Schmidt  juggles  with  them;  puts  them 
through  the  philological  mill  by  translating  them  back  into 
Aramaic,  the  presumed  language  that  Christ  spoke;  discovers 
that  in  this  and  cognate  languages  the  word  son  means  virtu- 
ally one  of  a  species.  That  is  all  right;  a  higher  critic's  mind 
is  built  that  way.  The  Son  of  man,  then,  becomes  a  specimen, 


THE   SUPREME  HISTORIC   VENTURE      203 

one  of  a  species,  a  specimen  man;  and  the  Son  of  God  is, — 
why,  is  a  specimen  God,  as  if  there  were  a  divine  species  for 
Him  to  represent;  this  latter  definition  having  to  be  fortified  by 
heathen  usage,  in  order  to  make  up  gods  enough  to  furnish  an 
average  specimen.  But  his  main  contention,  after  all  this  jug- 
gling, is  that  when  Jesus  says  Son  of  man  He  means  simply 
a  man;  and  Professor  Schmidt's  rather  lame  conclusion  is  that 
Jesus  never  said  it  at  all,  but  some  later  marplot  said  it  for 
Him.  Well,  we  won't  quarrel  with  his  philology;  his  conclu- 
sion, it  is  evident,  is  of  a  piece  with  his  prevailing  desire  to 
make  Christ  as  little  as  possible,  so  that  the  average  man,  con- 
tinuing to  be  an  undifferentiated  specimen,  can  grasp  Him. 
But  when  we  see,  as  we  see  on  every  gospel  page,  what  Jesus 
conceives  the  Son  of  man  should  be  and  do,  we  can  hardly 
think  He  has  the  average  man,  the  mere  specimen,  in  mind; 
for  certainly  the  race  in  general  had  not  averaged  up,  when 
He  spoke,  to  being  Lord  of  the  sabbath  and  forgiving  sins  and 
rising  from  the  dead.  Rather  He  is  describing  the  ideal  man, 
what  man,  as  his  evolution  dictates,  has  it  in  him  to  be;  and 
in  His  own  person  He  is  working  out  the  elements  of  that  ideal 
before  men's  eyes.  Not  the  specimen,  but  rather,  so  to  say, 
the  whole  species  stands  before  us  individualized,  and  con- 
scious of  closing  in  itself  the  ultimate  manhood  type  and  value. 
This  from  our  scientific  point  of  view  is  reasonable  and  feas- 
ible; for  our  evolution  course  has  all  along  been  working 
steadily  toward  the  perfected  individual,  of  the  species  yet 
more  than  a  specimen,  a  prophecy,  rather,  of  what  shall  be 
in  the  ages  to  come.  If  human  evolution  begins  with  the  im- 
pulse of  the  unlimited  spirit,  it  seems  as  if  it  must  in  course  of 
time  evolve  the  Christ,  the  Son  of  man  and  the  Son  of  God 
in  one,  as  soon  as  it  reaches  the  point  where  it  has  the  spirit 
without  measure.  In  this  sense  we  need  not  be  afraid  to  say 
Christ  is  a  product  of  evolution;  for  the  cosmic  energy,  which 
is  love,  must  do  so  much,  with  all  the  self-emptying  and  sacri- 
fice involved  therein,  for  pure  love's  sake.  How  could  love 
reach  its  full  expression  otherwise?  How  could  it  stop  one 
step  short  of  this? 


204  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

Now  the  discovery  of  all  this  might  conceivably  have  been 
left  to  the  scientific  mind  of  the  twentieth  century  to  put  into 
word  and  definition,  according  to  its  current  notions  of  biol- 
ogy; in  which  case  man  would  be  at  the  mercy  of  the  scientific 
vocabulary,  and  evolution  would  be  a  thing  for  scholars  and 
philosophers.  But  this  concerns  every  unlettered  man;  every 
man  who  knows  what  it  is  to  be  a  father  and  a  son  has  a  vital 
individual  interest  in  it.  How  then  shall  he  find  it  out,  in  the 
language  in  which  he  was  born?  What  way  so  natural,  so 
reasonable,  so  universally  adequate,  after  all,  as  for  the  Spirit 
of  the  universe,  the  Father  of  spirits,  to  announce,  "This  is 
my  beloved  Son,  in  whom  I  am  well  pleased,"  and  for  the  su- 
preme Personality,  once  evolved,  to  say  and  show  to  men  what 
the  Son  of  man,  the  Man  of  men,  should  be  and  do?  This 
is  precisely  what  the  Scripture  says  took  place,  and  this  has 
ever  since  been  recognized  as  an  authentic  revelation  from  the 
unseen  source  whence  the  power  and  spirit  of  it  proceeds.  How 
the  announcement  got  into  words,  and  when,  is  by  comparison 
a  paltry  matter;  we  have  the  revelation,  and  the  great  heart 
of  mankind,  and,  I  think,  the  large  reason  of  evolutionary 
science,  set  to  their  seal  that  it  is  true.  Evolution  has  become 
a  matter  not  of  bondage  and  blindness  but  of  sonship ;  and  the 
terms  Son  of  God  and  Son  of  man  are  doing  the  best  work  that 
it  is  in  words  to  do. 

Now  when  this  Personality,  whose  double  witness  that  He 
is  Son  of  man  and  Son  of  God  constitutes  Him  the  supreme 
Personality,  sets  forth  on  human  life,  how  shall  He  behave? 
What  shall  He  assume  that  He  is;  in  the  way  of  love  and  faith 
I  mean,  —  in  such  a  way  that  not  only  shall  men  recognize 
Him  as  He  is,  but  what  is  of  paramount  importance,  that  they 
shall  commit  themselves,  in  the  same  love  and  faith,  to  that 
spirit  and  current  of  life?  It  is  a  great  evolutionary  problem, 
which  not  science  alone  but  the  universal  mind  of  man  is  called 
to  solve.  Is  it  not  a  crowning  mercy  that  one  mind  solved  it, 
instead  of  leaving  the  matter  floating  through  the  ages  for  a 
scientific  syndicate  of  minds  to  solve? 

So  here  we  are  brought  back  to  the  young  Galilean  Jesus 


THE  SUPREME  HISTORIC   VENTURE      205 

setting  forth,  as  did  John  Sterling,  on  life,  but  on  a  life  how 
much  greater.  If  He  has  not  solved  the  problem,  no  one  has. 
Shall  He  solve  it  consciously  alone,  or  shall  He  make  equal 
connection  with  the  Father  of  spirits  who  is  witnessing  with 
Him?  In  other  words,  shall  He  be  an  agnostic,  as  so  many 
thinkers  are  now,  or  shall  He  live  and  act  as  if  He  knew  the 
source  of  His  life?  Here  is  what  the  agnostics  are  saying:  I 
quote  from  a  book  entitled  "A  Modern  Symposium":  "Man 
is  in  the  making;  but  henceforth  he  must  make  himself.  To 
that  point  Nature  has  led  him,  out  of  the  primeval  slime.  She 
has  given  him  limbs,  she  has  given  him  brain,  she  has  given 
him  the  rudiment  of  a  soul.  Now  it  is  for  him  to  make  or  mar 
that  splendid  torso.  Let  him  look  no  more  to  her  for  aid;  for 
it  is  her  will  to  create  one  who  has  the  power  to  create  himself. 
If  he  fail,  she  fails;  back  goes  the  metal  to  the  pot;  and  the 
great  process  begins  anew.  If  he  succeeds,  he  succeeds  alone. 
His  fate  is  in  his  own  hands."  In  this  programme  of  life  man 
not  only  bids  farewell  to  nature,  which  is  all  that  God  has 
ever  meant  to  him,  but  regards  himself  as  a  splendid  torso, 
with  the  rudiment  of  a  soul,  which  he  is  to  complete  without 
any  pattern  to  work  by,  except  what  is  furnished  by  his  own 
wisdom  and  will.  All  this  is  in  polar  contrast  to  our  young 
Galilean,  for  whom  nature  means  father  and  God,  whose  soul 
is  no  rudiment  but  completed  through  the  vital  upbuilding  of 
love  and  faith,  and  who  from  a  living  soul  is  setting  forth  to  be 
a  life-giving  spirit.  All  the  agnostic  seems  to  think  of  is  self- 
building;  the  manhood  he  would  create  is  a  hard,  self-reliant, 
self-regarding  manhood,  in  all  the  pride  of  his  intrinsic  great- 
ness. The  Galilean  hardly  seems  to  think  of  Himself  at  all; 
He  is  not  here  to  please  Himself ;  and  this  gives  an  attractive, 
sympathetic  tone  to  all  the  record  of  Him.  It  is  an  infinite 
relief  to  turn  from  the  cold  self-sufficiency  of  the  words 
we  have  just  read  to  the  more  winsome  idiom  of  the  gospel 
narrative. 

Imagine  what  would  be  the  effect  upon  an  ardent-minded, 
true-hearted  young  man,  if  there  should  come  pressing  into 
his  consciousness,  as  from  some  far-withdrawn  inner  depth, 


206  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

the  assurance,  "Thou  art  my  beloved  Son,  in  whom  I  am  well 
pleased."  This,  you  know,  is  what  is  reported  to  have  hap- 
pened to  Jesus  at  the  Jordan.  Along  with  this  assurance,  as 
the  same  report  relates,  He  saw  the  heavens  opened,  and  the 
Spirit  came  upon  Him  in  the  bodily  shape  of  a  dove.  Whether 
this  was  the  first  time  such  consciousness  of  His  significance 
in  the  world  had  been  with  Him  is  not  quite  clear;  most  likely 
it  was,  like  a  great  awakening  from  dreams  and  desires  that 
had  been  beautiful  and  true,  but  more  or  less  undefined.  At 
any  rate,  we  know  that  from  the  beginning  He  had  had  the 
bent,  the  appetency;  at  twelve  years  of  age,  He  was  impatient 
to  be  about  His  Father's  business,  and  thereafter,  until  this 
scene  at  the  Jordan,  His  wisdom  and  His  favor  with  God  and 
man  increased  with  His  stature  and  age.  The  germs  of  the 
matter  were  always  in  Him,  just  as  the  child  is  the  father  of 
the  man;  but  this  is  different  from  coming,  as  from  a  long 
orphanage,  to  know  how  great  His  paternity  was,  and  to  be 
confronted  with  the  question  what  to  do  about  it,  how  to  main- 
tain the  family  likeness  and  tradition,  how  to  be  true  to  this 
tremendous  noblesse  oblige.  All  men  have  it  obscurely  in  them 
to  be  sons  of  God;  but  to  be  the  beloved  Son,  the  first-born 
of  many  brethren,  and  therefore  to  make  the  will  and  nature 
of  the  Father  palpable,  and  to  give  to  as  many  as  received 
Him  power  themselves  to  become  sons  of  God,  —  was  not  this 
the  greatest  task,  and  the  greatest  glory,  ever  laid  upon  a  son 
of  man? 

That  He  took  that  majestic  trust  with  full  appreciation  of 
its  huge  involvements,  is  evident  from  the  next  thing  that  oc- 
curred. That  sweet  spirit,  so  accordant  with  the  angel's 
earlier  song  of  peace,  goodwill  to  men,  proved  at  first  to  be 
anything  but  dove-like  in  Him;  it  led  Him,  or  as  St.  Mark 
says,  it  drove  Him,  to  the  wilderness,  where  a  spirit  of  very 
different  sort  awaited  Him,  where,  we  may  say,  two  spirits  of 
a  diverse  impulse  were  fighting  to  obtain  possession  of  His 
life,  and  where  He,  from  the  wisdom  and  fibre  that  was  in  Him, 
was  to  make  the  momentous  decision.  Will  the  manhood 
which  the  ages  have  evolved  and  concentrated  in  this  person- 


THE   SUPREME  HISTORIC   VENTURE      207 

ality  stand  the  stress,  will  it  define  in  truest  manhood  terms 
what  it  is  to  be  Son  of  God,  so  that  henceforth  the  felt  spirit 
of  the  Father  of  spirits  shall  flow  consciously  and  wisely 
through  the  deeds  of  men?  It  is  a  breathless  moment  of  his- 
tory, this  forty  day  struggle  in  the  wilderness.  For  Satan's 
wisdom  and  methods,  which  whether  true  or  not  are  mighty, 
have  hitherto  usurped  the  spiritual  field,  and  if  they  are  dis- 
lodged must  give  place  to  something  yet  to  be  tried,  yet  prob- 
lematical and  experimental.  I  have  spoken  of  Christ's  life  as 
the  most  colossal  scientific  experiment  that  was  ever  made. 
Well,  here  in  the  wilderness  it  begins:  He  must  determine  by 
what  apparatus,  what  procedure,  what  behavior  in  all  the  de- 
tails of  life,  He  shall  make  it.  Hitherto  men  have  been  the 
slaves  of  nature,  of  expediency,  of  custom,  of  law;  but  all  this, 
in  the  view  we  have  been  taking,  was  an  obligation  of  their  in- 
fancy and  childhood,  as  they  came  up  from  the  animal  to  the 
spiritual;  so  their  bondage  has  been,  after  all,  to  God,  who  has 
evolved  their  lower  nature  as  well  as  their  higher;  and  this 
other  spirit,  now  recognized  as  so  malign  and  destructive,  is 
virtually  raising  the  question,  not  whether  these  lower  wis- 
doms and  methods  shall  cease  from  man,  but  whether  they 
shall  be  on  top,  shall  control  his  action  as  if  they  were  his 
highest  self-expression.  It  is  a  question,  at  bottom,  of  the 
all-directing  current  of  spirit,  the  tide  of  manhood,  whether, 
as  a  felt  pulsation  of  God,  it  shall  be  inward  toward  self,  or 
outward  toward  the  vitalizing  and  uplifting  of  the  world. 

I  cannot  stay  to  dwell  long  on  the  stages  of  this  temptation 
in  the  wilderness;  full  enough  though  they  be,  each  one,  for  a 
whole  season's  study.  You  will  note  how  accurately  adapted 
to  the  situation  every  temptation  is:  how  the  lower  spirit  says 
every  time,  "If  thou  be  the  Son  of  God,"  do  this,  make  the 
fact  evident  in  this  way;  you  will  note  too  how  every  time  the 
answer  is,  not  God's  son  should  assert  Himself  so  and  so,  but 
man  shall  not  live  by  bread  alone,  shall  not  tempt  God,  shall 
worship  none  other  than  the  very  highest  and  holiest  that  he 
feels  God  to  be.  Christ  is  here  to  express  God  in  terms  of  the 
human;  and  so  alone  can  He  express  the  human  in  terms  of 


208  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

God.  But  if  it  is  this  latter  that  He  will  express,  it  shall  be 
the  human  as  it  is  at  the  fulness  of  the  time,  when  the  current 
of  love  and  faith  is  ready  to  have  free  course;  not  as  it  was 
in  the  groping,  twilight,  childish  times,  when  men  were  gov- 
erned by  environment  and  expediency.  We  can  see  from  this 
how  wisely  and  truly  Christ  always  expressed  Himself  when 
He  set  forth  what  the  Son  of  man,  man  in  His  idea,  should  be 
and  do. 

The  first  temptation,  beginning  on  the  lowest  and  most  ob- 
vious plane,  is  as  rampant  now,  the  world  over,  as  it  was  here 
in  the  wilderness.  Man,  feed  yourself;  use  your  opportunity 
to  get  the  comforts,  the  bodily  supports,  the  gratifications  of 
your  body;  see  what  a  chance  you  have;  if  you  are  the  son 
of  the  creative  power  of  the  universe  the  very  stones  may  at 
your  word  be  your  bread.  Well,  we  know  what  marvelous  in- 
ventive skill  man  can  put  forth  to  make  this  assertion  true; 
there  seems  to  be  no  end  to  his  power  to  take  the  resources  of 
nature  and  turn  them  to  his  purpose;  and  how  predominantly, 
in  the  spheres  both  of  labor  and  luxury,  it  seems  to  reduce  it- 
self to  getting  enough  to  eat.  How  much  of  civilization  fo- 
cusses  in  this.  Here  is  how  a  recent  book  puts  it:  "For,  as 
we  read  history,  the  economic  factor  determines  all  the  others. 
'Man  ist,  was  er  isst,'  as  the  German  said;  and  morals,  art, 
religion,  all  the  so-called  'ideal  activities/  are  just  allotropic 
forms  of  bread  and  meat."  The  man  who  wrote  this  has  heard 
Satan's  temptation  and  answered  it  the  other  way;  he  too  rep- 
resents himself  as  trying  to  uplift  the  race,  his  panacea  for 
their  ills  being  a  socialistic  scheme;  and  what  he  wants  to  do 
is  to  give  everybody  enough  to  eat,  so  as  to  build  up  their 
tissues  into  healthy,  happy  physical  men,  from  which,  as  he 
thinks,  the  sound  mind  in  a  sound  body  will  follow  by  natural 
consequence.  What  an  opportunity  for  Christ,  —  to  steer  men 
to  their  God-sonship  through  the  tissues  of  the  body!  But 
no!  man's  spirit  is  set  in  a  better  way;  his  true  life  comes 
through  the  words  of  God,  and  when  these  are  his  meat  and 
drink,  as  they  always  were  to  Christ,  the  wants  of  the  body 
will  be  cared  for  as  an  incidental  thing.  When  later  He  said, 


THE  SUPREME  HISTORIC   VENTURE      209 

"What  man  of  you,  whom  if  his  son  ask  bread,  will  he  give  him 
a  stone?"  was  He  not  thinking  of  His  own  hunger  in  the  wil- 
derness, and  from  His  own  experience  putting  it  upon  men  to 
take  the  God  part,  not  the  man's,  and  to  be  sons  of  God  by 
giving  the  best  wheaten  bread,  and  the  best  that  is  in  them 
every  way,  rather  than  the  animal  part,  by  going  through  life 
an  embodied  hunger  and  craving?  And  when  He  fed  the  five 
thousand,  was  not  every  word  that  through  his  filial  lips  pro- 
ceeded out  of  the  mouth  of  God  so  much  greater  food  to  their 
souls  that  the  five  loaves  and  two  small  fishes  were  an  object 
lesson  of  how  easily,  with  God's  words  to  supplement,  the  body 
could  respond  to  the  fulness  of  the  spirit?  Truly,  these  wil- 
derness lessons  became  a  very  vital  reality  in  the  ministry  that 
succeeded. 

The  second  temptation  takes  another  ground,  I  was  going 
to  say,  higher^  but  I  am  not  so  sure.  It  is  as  extreme  on  the 
mystic  side  of  life,  as  was  the  first  on  the  animal.  Man,  if  you 
are  the  son  of  God,  use  the  fact  to  reveal  God's  secret  and 
astounding  working;  you  can  show  He  is  in  you  by  making 
exceptions  to  the  laws  of  nature,  and  by  a  wonderful  feat  of 
levitation  actually  put  Him  at  His  word,  and  showing  a  gaping, 
wondering  world  that  when  He  promised  to  bear  men  up  by 
angels  He  meant  what  He  said.  This  temptation,  you  see,  was 
a  hoary  old  thing;  its  principle  came  down  from  the  time  when 
the  serpent  in  Eden  had  said,  God  said  you  would  die.  Try 
it  once,  ye  shall  not  surely  die;  put  Him  at  His  word  and  see 
how  false  it  is;  or  as  here  put  Him  at  His  word  and  demon- 
strate how  true  it  is.  This  opens  the  whole  sphere  of  the  mar- 
velous, the  occult,  the  exceptional,  in  a  word,  of  the  things 
wherein  especially  gifted  souls  may  separate  their  life  from  the 
general  ongoings  of  humanity.  We  know  what  has  come  of 
this  in  history:  the  unhealthy  effort  to  make  men  trust  in 
powers  exerted  for  them  and  not  in  them,  powers  available 
only  to  the  skilled  and  initiated,  and  exhibited  as  a  holy  show 
and  not  as  a  universal  and  practical  vitalization  of  character. 
If  Jesus  had  yielded  to  this  He  would  have  committed  Himself 
to  going  through  life  as  a  kind  of  fakir,  astonishing  men  by 


210  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

occult  feats,  or  perhaps  as  a  sort  of  Indian  yogi,  sitting  apart 
from  men  and  playing  the  role  of  an  inaccessible,  withdrawn 
sanctity  and  wisdom  which  can  only  be  looked  at.  You  see 
the  polar  opposite  of  this  temptation  to  all  the  whole- 
some bent  and  spirit  of  Jesus.  No:  not  tempting  God  by  put- 
ting the  word  on  which  you  feed  to  a  doubtful  test,  as  if  He 
were  some  cosmic  spirit  mystic  and  only  exceptionally  mani- 
festable; but  taking  your  common  life,  in  love  and  faith,  down 
from  the  pinnacle  to  the  needy  hearts  of  men,  and  making  it 
their  universal  resource  and  working  tool.  Put  all  that  is 
mystic  and  holy  in  you  to  the  homely  and  practical  issues  of 
life;  so  only  shall  you  prove  yourself  Son  of  God,  in  terms  of 
believing,  energizing,  life-giving  manhood,  the  perfect  son  of 
man. 

If  Jesus  had  succumbed  to  this  second  temptation,  which 
I  am  disposed  to  regard  as  the  subtlest  and  in  the  end  the  dead- 
liest of  the  three,  the  game  would  have  been  up.  It  would 
have  amounted  to  expatriation  from  the  spirit  of  the  whole 
family  in  heaven  and  earth,  the  Spirit  of  God  and  the  spirit 
of  man  alike.  For  while,  on  the  God  side,  it  would  have  seemed 
in  the  innocence  of  exaggerated  trust,  to  be  leaping  into  the 
arms  of  the  divine,  by  emphasizing  this  at  the  expense  of  the 
human,  in  naive  contrast  to  the  first  and  third  temptations, 
which  emphasized  the  human  at  the  expense  of  the  divine,  in 
reality  it  would  have  been  blind  committal  to  the  God  power 
at  the  expense  of  the  God  love,  which  latter  is  the  central  God 
essence.  Or  to  put  it  in  another  way,  it  would  have  been  using 
God's  freely  proffered  love,  making  traffic  of  it  as  it  were, 
without  the  spontaneous  interchange  of  love  in  return;  for  it 
would  have  been  detachment  from  the  God-spirit  and  transfer 
to  the  attitude  of  the  doubter  and  tempter,  who  instead  of 
moving  freely  in  the  love  current  tries  freakish  experiments 
on  the  very  life  in  which  he  lives.  But  this  is  not  the  worst 
of  it.  On  the  man  side  it  would  have  made  the  Christ  inac- 
cessible, by  making  His  manhood  not  a  universal  uplift  but  a 
clever,  magical  performance,  a  thing  to  be  looked  at,  not  emu- 
lated. How  easily  this  temptation  may  steal  upon  us  all! 


THE   SUPREME  HISTORIC   VENTURE      211 

The  thing  can  be  done  by  the  popular  orator,  by  the  brilliant 
scholar,  by  the  talented  business  man,  by  the  unscrupulous 
millionaire;  by  any  means,  in  fact,  whereby  a  man  occupies 
a  plane  of  privilege  or  cleverness  from  which  he  is  merely  a 
detached  spectator  or  exploiter  of  the  great  common  life  below. 
Consider,  then,  what  resistance  to  this  subtle  temptation 
means.  This  straight-seeing  carpenter,  filled  with  the  Holy 
Spirit,  not  partly  filled,  is  bent,  according  to  his  insight,  on 
making  the  will  of  His  Father  prevail.  And  here  comes  in 
His  wholly  new  reading  of  that  will.  You  remember  how 
cleverly  Matthew  Arnold  phrases  this  ideal  of  His;  so  cleverly 
that  we  do  not  at  first  recognize  how  fatally  he  limits  it. 
Matthew  Arnold  says  that  the  supreme  Christian  ideal  is  to 
make  reason  and  the  will  of  God  prevail.  Reason?  Why, 
that  is  the  ideal  of  the  Greek  philosophers;  if  they  had  their 
way,  perfect  reason  —  justice  and  temperance  and  all  the  self- 
contained,  self-restraining  virtues,  —  would  prevail,  and  the 
world  would  still  be  congealed  in  heathenism  and  triumphant 
law.  Jesus'  ideal  is,  rather,  to  make  the  unreasonable  virtues 
and  the  will  of  God  prevail;  for  in  His  reading  God  is  identi- 
fied with  the  unreasonable  virtues,  the  virtues  of  grace;  is 
identified  with  love  and  faith  and  the  hope  for  mankind  that 
springs  out  of  these.  These,  you  will  recall,  are  the  new  in- 
vention of  Christianity.  And  what  hope,  what  surge  out  of 
the  deadly  restriction  and  self-bondage  of  the  present  heathen 
and  legal  dispensation,  except  by  a  grand  venture  and  abandon 
on  the  new  ocean  of  love  and  faith?  It  is  just  to  this  new 
ideal  that  Jesus'  resistance  to  this  second  temptation  commits 
Him,  commits  Him  and  confirms  Him  in  it. 

To  leave  the  Christ  inaccessible,  to  emphasize  the  god,  is, 
however,  alluring  and  self-pleasing,  to  leave  the  rank  and  file 
down  there  at  the  foot  of  the  pinnacle  where  it  was  before. 
The  heathen  and  the  legalists  already  know  what  it  is  to  em- 
phasize the  god;  they  have  described  it  and  prophesied  it;  it 
is  no  new  revelation.  Jesus  defines  it  in  human  terms;  but  it 
is  by  turning  their  ideas  face  about.  "You  are  making  Him 
more  supernatural  all  the  while,"  says  one  of  my  friends. 


212  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

But  I  am  not  trying  to;  it  is  He  that  is  doing  it;  in 
spite  of  all  my  efforts  to  hold  Him  back  He  keeps  getting  be- 
yond me  and  beyond  the  old  humanity.  He  is  doing  it  just 
by  not  emphasizing  the  god;  and  as  Browning  puts  it,  so  when 
we  bethink  ourselves  we  say, 

Such  ever  was  love's  way:  to  rise,  it  stoops. 

In  other  words,  in  all  His  transcendency  He  is  emphasizing 
the  god  by  making  man,  with  whom  He  has  thoroughly  identi- 
fied Himself,  more  supernatural;  is  emphasizing  the  god  by 
launching  Himself  on  the  divine,  unreasoning  tide  of  love,  and 
inspiring  men  to  commit  themselves  to  the  same.  So  He  makes 
the  Christ  accessible  by  coming  down  from  the  pinnacle  to  the 
broad  plane  of  help,  —  that  is  His  answer.  There  are  two 
ways  to  get  your  ideals  into  the  hearts  of  men ;  and  they  show 
themselves  in  the  simplest  matters,  as  simple  as  the  writing  of 
a  paragraph.  One  is  to  make  everything  so  plain  and  easy 
that  they  can  understand  without  putting  forth  effort;  very 
desirable  this,  but  there  is  the  risk  that  they  will  hold  cheap 
what  they  get  so  cheaply,  and  so  just  look  on  and  let  the  writer 
do  all  the  thinking.  The  other  is,  while  putting  before  men 
a  hard  thought  or  ideal,  to  stimulate  them  to  do  enough  more, 
in  cerebration  or  in  spiritual  response,  to  appropriate  it.  There 
cannot  be  much  question  which  alternative  is  the  more  valu- 
able. We  have  Jesus'  way  before  us.  The  divine  is  here,  ex- 
pressed in  your  own  terms.  Rise  now  to  meet  Him.  You  can 
if  you  will  drink  of  His  cup  and  be  baptized  with  His  bap- 
tism. To  do  more,  to  take  of  the  energy  of  love  and  do  un- 
reasonable things  will  then  be  easy,  nay,  the  natural  way  of 
living. 

The  third  temptation,  not  now  on  the  solitary  pinnacle  but 
on  the  exceeding  high  mountain  whence  are  visible  all  the  king- 
doms of  the  world,  enters  that  sphere  of  practical  action  with 
which  Jesus  must  needs  reckon;  for  if  He  is  Son  of  God,  He 
is  obviously  the  one  to  bring  about  that  kingdom  of  heaven 
which  John  has  preached,  which  the  prophets  have  prophesied, 
and  which  He  Himself  has  supremely  at  heart.  "Behold,  a  king 


THE  SUPREME  HISTORIC  VENTURE      213 

shall  reign  in  righteousness,  and  princes  shall  rule  in  judg- 
ment,'7 the  old-time  seers  had  said;  here  now  was  the  grand 
opportunity.  If  you  think  this  opened  a  dream  too  vast  for 
the  young  Galilean  to  cherish,  consider  what  possibilities  must 
have  risen,  to  the  mind  of  one  who  had  received  assurance  that 
He  was  the  beloved  Son  of  God,  and  who  afterward,  in  the 
very  pursuance  of  His  lowly  mission  had  to  escape  to  a  moun- 
tain to  evade  those  who  would  make  Him  king  by  force.  To 
set  up  the  kingdom  of  heaven,  with  a  Prince  of  the  blood,  as 
it  were,  upon  the  throne;  what  thoughts  of  ways  and  means, 
ideals  and  principles,  must  have  inhered  in  the  conviction  that 
He  was  the  chosen  One  to  do  it.  John  had  just  been  depicting 
that  kingdom  in  austere  hues,  with  the  stern  alternative  of 
fire  and  the  axe  as  penalty  of  the  rejection  of  it.  Men  had 
always  hitherto  been  driven  into  kingdoms,  that  is  into  sub- 
jection; the  one  dominating  idea  was  that  it  was  the  business 
of  the  rank  and  file  to  be  governed,  not  to  govern  themselves. 
Men  would  not  come  to  subjection  of  their  own  motion;  they 
were  proverbially  stiff-necked  and  rebellious,  the  best  of  them. 
Therefore  drive  them;  force  them;  raise  your  sceptre  and  put 
them  in  the  forms  of  government,  if  not  the  heart.  Then  you 
could  bend  them  to  your  will,  as  it  were  in  detail.  I  stood 
once  on  a  hill  in  Germany,  Hohen-Syburg,  where  was  an  old 
pool  or  spring,  in  which  the  tradition  says  the  Saxon  Duke 
Wittekind,  with  all  his  people,  was  forced  by  Charlemagne 
from  heathenism  into  Christianity  by  the  simple  method  of 
compulsory  baptism.  What  other  plan  of  empire  so  time- 
honored  and  compendious?  But  no:  that  was  Satan's  way,  the 
external,  the  way  of  war  and  tyranny;  that  was  giving  the 
worship  —  the  worth-ship  —  to  the  adversary  method,  as  had 
always  been  done.  The  temptation  had  only  to  be  raised  to 
be  summarily  rejected;  there  is  a  trenchancy  about  the  an- 
swer which  seems  to  betoken  that  the  mists  and  glamours  of 
things  were  at  last  cleared  away,  and  the  baseness  of  the  whole 
proposal  stood  forth  in  its  naked  ugliness.  Worship  God:  as- 
cribe the  worth-ship  to  the  God  you  have  come  to  see,  and 
the  spirit  with  which  your  life  is  filled,  —  that  is  the  answer. 


214  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

Whatever  sovereignty  comes  from  that  comes  by  the  way  of 
service  to  that  all-controlling  ideal. 

Such  committal  to  kingliness  as  this  sheathes  the  sword,  and 
in  lieu  of  it  opens  the  way  of  repentance  and  humility. 

Repentance  —  have  you  considered  what  this  is?  It  be- 
longs to  the  new  idiom  of  things  that  is  coming  in;  it  is  the 
all-men's  means  of  entrance  into  the  kingdom.  John  had  intro- 
duced the  word;  but  he  was  still  of  the  old  order,  and  to  him 
it  meant  mainly  what  men  should  repent  from;  and  it  came  to 
many  who  did  not  feel  the  need  of  repenting  from  anything, 
being  already  candidates  for  the  kingdom,  as  children  of  Abra- 
ham. What  need  for  them  to  change  their  minds  from  some- 
thing, or  bother  about  their  spiritual  attitude  at  all,  so  long  as 
all  the  kingdom  they  had  minds  for  was  already  theirs  by 
right  of  birth?  But  Jesus,  who  came  down  from  the  moun- 
tain to  preach  the  same  duty  of  repentance,  had  supremely  in 
mind  what  men  were  to  repent  to.  For  it  was  no  longer  a 
question  of  being  children  of  Abraham,  and  ruling  the  earth; 
it  was  their  marvelous  opportunity  of  becoming  children  of 
God.  "The  kingdom  of  heaven  is  at  hand,"  He  said;  change 
your  minds,  then,  throw  open  the  doors  of  your  spirit,  to  get 
ready  for  it,  and  welcome  it  as  it  is.  It  is  a  new  thing;  you 
cannot  enter  by  the  old  ways.  It  is  a  new  life,  for  every  man 
that  comes  in;  there  is  no  antagonism  of  ruler  and  subject 
here,  nor  any  pride  of  birth  or  office-holding.  It  is  a  kingdom 
where  all  are  made  kings,  and  priests  of  a  higher  king;  and 
this  by  simply  opening  their  hearts  to  receive  the  kingliness 
into  themselves.  This  is  a  new  definition  of  repentance.  The 
old  world  was  crowding  the  idea  out  of  its  scheme;  was  taking 
pride  in  a  heart  fixed  and  changeless ;  nay,  its  law  was  making 
it  feel  that  a  man  once  established  thereunder  could  not  change 
himself,  and  need  not.  The  same  idea  pervades  our  scientific 
thinking,  which  will  hold  a  man  prisoner  to  his  environment 
and  heredity.  It  is  almost  an  axiom  of  science  and  common 
sentiment  that  as  a  man  is,  so  he  must  remain,  that  it  is  not 
really  in  him  to  change  his  heart  and  mind. 


THE  SUPREME  HISTORIC   VENTURE      215 

The  world  will  not  believe  a  man  repents: 
And  this  wise  world  of  ours  is  mainly  right. 
Full  seldom  doth  a  man  repent,  or  use 
Both  grace  and  will  to  pick  the  vicious  quitch 
Of  blood  and  custom  wholly  out  of  him, 
And  make  all  clean,  and  plant  himself  afresh. 

So  a  wise  poet  has  made  King  Arthur  say.  But  this  Galilean 
king  committed  his  procedure  to  the  idea  that  a  man  can 
change;  that  the  mind  and  heart  of  man  are  not  of  necessity 
hard  and  rigid  but  flexible,  capable  always  of  being  opened 
and  expanded  to  the  largest  growth  and  nobleness.  I  have  the 
idea  that  repentance  is  not  a  momentary  thing  but  permanent; 
its  other  name  is  readiness,  to  rise  out  of  hardness  into  love,  to 
commit  itself  to  a  more  generous  effort  of  faith. 

We  needs  must  love  the  highest  when  we  see  it, 
Not  Lancelot,  nor  another, 

said  once  a  guilty  queen,  waking  late  to  the  high  possibilities 
of  her  life.  And  such  an  ability  as  this  is  what  Jesus  took  for 
granted,  in  His  sublime  faith  in  human  nature.  Everyone  can; 
there  is  something  in  him  that  can;  when  the  door  is  open  he 
can  enter;  for  when  man  is  evolved  to  the  point  of  adultness 
he  is  not  a  rigid  and  unchanging  thing,  like  a  higher  au- 
tomaton; he  is  for  the  first  time  free  and  adaptable.  There- 
fore our  Lord's  first  business,  when  He  comes  down  from  the 
mountain  to  announce  His  kingdom,  is,  to  treat  men  so.  Do 
you  see  what  a  new  stimulus  to  development  this  brings  to  the 
sons  of  men?  It  takes  the  race  of  man,  at  the  deadlock  to 
which  the  empire  of  law  and  reason  is  conducting  it,  and  virtu- 
ally says,  You  can  overcome  this  deadly  inertia;  you  can  vi- 
brate responsive  to  these  higher  things;  you  can  stretch  out 
your  withered  hand  and  open  your  withered  heart,  if  you  will; 
for  there  is  enough  in  your  own  higher  nature,  so  capable  of 
love  and  faith,  to  be  your  support  and  strength,  if  you  will  but 
exert  it.  This,  to  my  mind,  is  what  is  involved  in  repentance. 
The  command  to  it,  in  Christ's  royal  reading  of  the  term,  is 
His  divine  expression  of  His  limitless  faith  in  human  nature. 

But  when  He  came  down  from  the  exceeding  high  moun- 
tain, He  came  with  this  assurance  still  in  His  mind,  that  He 


216  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

was  the  beloved,  the  unique  Son  of  God;  He  was  not  to  make 
His  way  and  build  His  kingdom  by  ceasing  in  any  whit  to  be 
that.  He  was  simply  transferring  the  same  ideals,  the  same 
consciousness  of  life-values,  to  another  field,  or  rather  to  the 
universal  field.  He  had  rejected  Satan's  way,  and  in  His 
mighty  experiment  was  taking  God's  way.  But  how  shall  the 
Son  of  God,  thus  moving  among  men,  look?  How  shall  He 
comport  Himself?  Jesus  was  not  without  prophecy  to  guide 
Him  and  lay  down  His  programme;  that  very  announcement 
of  His  sonship  at  the  Jordan  was  a  quotation  from  the  second 
Psalm,  which  may  have  come  to  Him  at  once  through  the 
channels  of  His  own  memory  and  out  of  the  ethereal  realm 
about  Him.  And  that  Psalm  lays  down  a  programme  for  the 
Son  of  God,  as  the  ideal  existed  when  the  Jews  had  earthly 
kings  and  kingdoms  to  pattern  from.  You  remember  how 
crude  that  early  ideal  is:  it  represents  God  as  sitting  in  the 
heavens  and  laughing  in  derision  at  earthly  kings  and  their 
futile  oppositions,  and  the  Son  of  God  as  a  capricious  Being 
who  must  be  propitiated  and  conciliated  lest  He  be  angry  and 
kill  them;  and  all  this  in  support  of  the  conception  that  He 
is  to  make  His  enemies  His  footstool.  That  ideal,  made  ven- 
erable by  age  and  classic  song,  still  held  the  ground  when 
Christ  came;  it  was  at  the  basis  of  Satan's  temptation,  and  so 
had  wrought  its  work  in  Jesus'  own  mind.  It  must  be  reckoned 
with;  and  He  must  take  such  a  course  with  men  as  either  to 
confirm  it  or  dislodge  men  from  it.  It  may  be  too  there  were 
elements  of  truth  in  it,  a  larger  truth,  it  may  be  eternally  true 
that  the  Son  of  God  is  destined  to  reign  until  He  has  put  all 
enemies  under  His  feet.  But  in  what  sense  is  this  to  be  true? 
He  must  take  the  way  that  shall  disengage  the  purer  sense 
from  the  cruder,  and  preserve  the  truth  for  higher  uses.  The 
old  seers  and  psalmists  had  a  real  vision  of  the  great  things  to 
be;  but  in  their  foreshortened  notions,  which  were  just  like 
ours,  they  seized  the  kingship  and  its  results  while  their  eyes 
were  still  holden  from  the  real  kingliness.  What  is  real  king- 
liness,  the  kingliness  that  is  patterned  after  the  King  of  kings? 
Is  he  a  real  king,  who  sits  arrayed  in  splendor,  and  walks  in 


THE  SUPREME  HISTORIC   VENTURE      217 

luxury,  while  under  his  sway  are  gnashing  teeth  and  turbulent 
rebellious  hearts,  and  while  all  around  him  are  rags  and  squalor 
and  the  sigh  of  the  oppressed?  Shall  the  king  keep  his  iron 
foot  on  these,  or  shall  he  be  a  beneficent  influence,  like  the  God 
whom  he  represents,  to  relieve,  to  uplift,  to  help  men  bear  the 
burdens  of  existence?  The  true  kingliness  wins,  not  subdues; 
or  rather,  it  subdues  by  winning.  A  story  is  told  of  an  old- 
time  Oriental  monarch,  who  on  coming  to  his  throne  in  a  time 
of  revolts  and  wide-spread  disloyalties,  boasted  that  he  would 
slay  all  his  enemies,  and  when  later,  in  the  era  of  prosperity 
and  good-will  that  he  inaugurated,  these  very  rebellious  ones 
came  to  do  him  enthusiastic  homage,  was  reminded  of  his 
boast.  "But  are  the  enemies  not  slain?"  he  replied;  "They  are 
no  longer  enemies,  for  in  my  reign  of  kindness  and  wisdom 
and  peace  their  enmity  is  dead."  Here  was  the  real  kingliness, 
a  kingliness  that  created,  not  destroyed;  that  gave  the  sterling 
allegiance  of  his  subjects  a  chance  to  be,  not  crushed  and  out- 
raged. And  that,  in  Jesus'  view,  is  the  kingliness  of  the  Son 
of  God,  to  which  His  programme  of  life  must  be  adjusted.  It 
is  His  reading  of  life,  as  it  has  emerged  from  the  searching 
fire  of  temptation  and  shaped  itself  into  the  duty  of  the  Son 
of  man. 

Here  comes  in  that  other  virtue  of  which  I  spoke,  the  virtue 
of  humility;  a  phase  of  the  new  pulsation  of  life  which  we  have 
not  yet  considered.  I  quoted,  you  remember,  Mr.  Chesterton's 
remark  that  while  Christianity  had  taken  and  naturalized  all 
the  pagan  virtues,  it  had  invented  three  absolutely  new  ones, 
faith,  hope,  and  charity,  and  that  these,  as  distinguished  from 
the  dictates  of  reason  and  common  sense,  were  the  absolutely 
unreasonable  virtues.  But  to  this  list  he  later  added  this 
fourth  virtue  of  humility,  saying  that  this  also  was  new  inven- 
tion of  Christianity,  and  that  the  hope  of  the  world  depended 
on  it,  as  on  the  others,  for  its  deliverance  from  deadlock  and 
its  progress  to  higher  things.  Humility  —  what  is  this?  It 
is  not  a  self -pleasing  thing;  we  would  all  much  rather  be  proud 
than  humble,  and  if  we  haven't  anything  to  be  proud  of,  too 
many  of  us  try  to  make  up  the  lack  by  being  vain.  But  the 


2i 8  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

fact  that  humility  is  not  self-pleasing  is  just  what  saves  it  and 
makes  it  a  new  power  of  life.  Humility  is  no  more  self-abase- 
ment than  it  is  self-aggrandizement;  rather,  it  is  the  adjust- 
ment of  our  spirit  to  life  as  it  is,  large  or  lowly,  and  as  we 
essentially  are,  without  reference  to  self  at  all.  It  is  in  fact 
just  what  comes  into  life  from  the  elimination  of  the  self- 
element.  Think  of  that,  and  you  will  realize  how  it  makes 
things  fall  into  their  real  and  related  place.  When  self  is 
eliminated,  for  the  first  time  life  and  the  world  are  seen  and 
treated  as  they  truly  are,  without  the  obscuring  glamours  of 
self-interest  or  pride,  and  without  the  twist  of  jealous  preju- 
dice, to  distort  the  view.  For  the  first  time,  then,  Sophocles' 
ideal  is  truly  realized,  "to  see  life  steadily  and  see  it  whole"; 
it  is  only  the  humble  man  who  can  do  that.  This  helps  us  to 
understand  why  Jesus  saw  so  much  more  in  manhood  than 
had  ever  been  seen  before;  and  why,  in  spite  o'f  all  the  dis- 
counts that  he  must  make  for  sin  and  depravity  —  and  how 
great  these  were  He,  who  needed  not  that  any  should  testify 
of  man,  for  He  knew  what  was  in  man,  He  was  well  aware  - 
yet  He  trusted  Himself  whole-souled  to  the  deeper  human  na- 
ture, in  order  that  by  the  power  of  such  trust  the  good  that 
was  possible  in  it  might  some  day  become  real.  To  the  un- 
regenerate  heart  this  humility  looks  like  a  weakling  virtue.  It 
looks  like  knuckling  under,  or  at  best  like  an  enthusiastic 
Quixotism,  treating  men  as  they  are  not.  Well,  it  is,  but  it 
is  none  the  less  the  hope  of  the  world.  It  is  just  the  practical 
attitude  that  this  supreme  historic  venture  takes;  the  huge 
experiment  in  life  which  aims  to  awaken  an  answering  life. 
When  it  is  carried  far  enough  to  turn  the  other  cheek  to  the 
smiter,  yielding,  as  it  looks,  it  is  at  least  strong  enough  to  re- 
main steadfastly  the  same  in  spite  of  evil  provocation  and  con- 
tempt. And  when  the  same  lowly  virtue  goes  steadily  and 
faithfully  on  to  death  and  the  cross,  its  real  strength  becomes 
manifest;  it  is  the  manliest,  mightiest  virtue  in  life,  so  trans- 
cendently  great  that  Jesus7  death,  with  the  staunch  humility 
of  faith  that  led  to  it,  has  been  laid  hold  of  as  the  one  concrete 
event  that  redeems  the  world. 


THE  SUPREME  HISTORIC  VENTURE      219 

How  easily  we  deceive  ourselves  about  the  values  of  life, 
until  we  get  down  to  the  eternal  principles  of  things.  Here  is 
a  man  who,  making  no  adventitious  claims  for  self,  calmly  en- 
dures contempt,  ridicule,  torture,  death,  His  self-reverence  and 
self-control  being  all  the  while  intact  and  prevailing;  while  all 
round  Him  are  men  who,  in  their  nervous  dread  lest  their  self- 
dignity  should  be  invaded,  bolster  it  up  with  scorn  and  great 
swelling  words,  and  would  if  the  stress  came  run  away  from 
a  cow.  And  here  we  see  how  truly  humility  is  a  new  thing  in 
the  earth,  a  Christ  invention.  The  ancient  and  modern  pagan- 
ism makes  the  supreme  quest  of  life  happiness;  the  happiness 
of  a  proud,  prevailing  egoism.  And  it  gets  happiness;  it  is  the 
law  of  our  being  that  we  get  what  we  supremely  want.  Mr. 
Chesterton  speaks  of  "the  absurd  shallowness  of  those  who 
imagine  that  the  pagan  enjoyed  himself  only  in  a  materialistic 
sense.  Of  course,  he  enjoyed  himself,  not  only  intellectually 
even,  he  enjoyed  himself  morally,  he  enjoyed  himself  spiritu- 
ally. But  it  was  himself  that  he  was  enjoying;  on  the  face  of 
it,  a  very  natural  thing  to  do."  It  was  the  reasonable  quest 
of  heathenism;  eminently  reasonable;  we  see  its  result  in  the 
Pharisee,  who  was  really  nothing  but  a  Jewish  pagan,  as  he 
stands  hugging  himself  in  proud  delight,  and  thanks  God  that 
he  is  not  as  other  men  are.  But,  as  Mr.  Chesterton,  in  his 
contention  that  humility  is  a  newly  invented  and  essentially 
unreasonable  virtue,  goes  on  to  say:  "The  psychological  dis- 
covery is  merely  this,  that  whereas  it  had  been  supposed  that 
the  fullest  possible  enjoyment  is  to  be  found  by  extending  our 
ego  to  infinity,  the  truth  is  that  the  fullest  possible  enjoyment 
is  to  be  found  by  reducing  our  ego  to  zero."  This  is  just  what 
Jesus,  the  carpenter  Son  of  God,  did;  and  we  name  the  virtue 
humility;  and  at  the  end,  in  the  very  shadow  of  the  impending 
cross,  we  hear  him  saying,  "These  things  have  I  spoken  unto 
you,  that  my  joy  might  remain  in  you,  and  that  your  joy  might 
be  full."  Oh,  friends,  a  prophetic  soul  in  the  twilight  period 
had  said,  "Behold  and  see  if  there  be  any  sorrow  like  unto  my 
sorrow,"  and  modern  interpreters,  applying  this  to  Jesus,  have 
called  him  the  Man  of  Sorrows.  Behold  and  see:  is  there  any 


220  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

joy  like  the  joy  of  a  strong,  self-denying,  creative,  humble 
faith? 

When  Jesus  came  down  from  the  mountain  where  in  sight 
of  all  the  kingdoms  of  the  earth  He  had  met  and  solved  the 
problem  of  life  in  His  own  godlike  way,  He  came  down  to 
what  Satan  and  the  world  would  have  called  an  inglorious  anti- 
climax. He  had  stood  before  the  opened  heavens  and  heard 
the  Voice;  had  received  the  baptism  of  water  and  the  spirit, 
dove-like  yet  with  eternal  power;  and  the  upshot  was  —  He 
went  home  to  Nazareth,  among  His  old-time  neighbors,  bent 
on  healing  diseases  and  opening  prison  doors,  on  cheering  the 
poor  and  turning  His  hand,  as  you  and  I  may  do,  to 

that  best  portion  of  a  good  man's  life, 

His  little,  nameless,  unremembered  acts 
Of  kindness  and  of  love; 

not  going  out  of  His  way  for  the  activities  of  life,  but  taking 
them  as  they  came.  And  when  men,  dimly  feejing  the  power 
of  the  highest  in  the  humblest,  began  to  respond,  coming  in 
crowds  to  the  light  and  warmth  of  His  presence,  He  "was 
moved  with  compassion  toward  them,  because  they  were  as 
sheep  not  having  a  shepherd";  their  ailment  was  not  that  they 
were  hungry,  that  was  only  incidental,  but  that  they  had  not 
discovered  the  principle  of  self-guidance  within  them.  So  He 
was  not  supremely  concerned  to  give  them  a  meal  of  victuals; 
that  again  was  only  incidental;  rather  "he  began  to  teach  them 
many  things."  He  labored  to  make  men  see  and  accept  life 
as  the  indwelling  grace  of  God  has  given  it  promise  and  po- 
tency. He  did  not  bring  up  their  past  before  them  at  all; 
rather  He  took  His  stand  on  the  new  beginning  of  things,  blot- 
ting out  that  past  in  which  they  had  wrought  the  will  of  the 
Gentiles,  and  opening  the  future.  So  it  was  consistently  in 
His  treatment  of  all.  When  the  woman  whom  the  hard  legal- 
ists were  ready  to  stone  for  her  sin  was  brought  to  Him, 
ashamed  and  cowering  before  the  purity  of  His  light,  He  said, 
"Neither  do  I  condemn  thee;  go,  and  sin  no  more."  There 
had  come  a  new  and  endless  opportunity  for  every  one.  And 
before  His  ministry  was  over,  He  had  announced  that  the  Son 


THE  SUPREME  HISTORIC  VENTURE      221 

of  man  —  the  man  that  He  would  have  all  of  them  be,  accord- 
ing to  their  faith  —  was  Lord  of  the  sabbath,  forgiver  of  sins, 
and  candidate  for  resurrection.  The  heavens  that  opened  to 
Him  are  thrown  freely  open  to  all. 


H.      THUS    IT    BECOMETH    US 

And  now,  in  this  new  warmth  and  light  and  life,  what  shall 
the  spirit  of  man  do?  What  shall  he  do,  first  of  all,  with  the 
law,  under  which  hitherto  he  has  subsisted,  and  which  the  mind 
and  customs  of  men  have  laden  with  prescriptions,  and  con- 
ventions, and  all  in  which  the  good  order  of  society  is  involved? 
Ours  is  a  world  of  law,  unbending,  impartial;  science  and  his- 
tory alike  have  discovered  that;  and  however  bold  and  free 
the  venture  of  the  spirit,  it  must  not  be  toward  anarchy  or 
toward  a  wild  caprice;  the  tether  of  law  and  order  is  still  there, 
no  jot  nor  tittle  impaired.  The  spirit  of  life,  evolved  to  this 
godlike  point,  must  have  its  higher  law  of  the  spirit  of  life; 
else  it  will  be  the  slave  and  irresponsible  minor  it  has  always 
been. 

I  have  already  described  this  law  of  the  spirit  of  life,  psy- 
chologically, as  a  kind  of  overflow  or  surplusage,  whereby  the 
life  of  the  soul  is  set  in  the  outward  and  neighbor-regarding 
current,  not  in  the  inward  and  self-regarding;  and  the  spirit 
of  man  itself,  when  it  is  committed  to  this  great  reversal  of 
direction,  I  have  described  as  free  from  all  tyranny  of  alien 
will,  joyously  free  to  be  and  to  do  just  what  it  wills.  We  are 
now  to  see  how  this  grand  reversal  was  applied  to  the  laws  and 
prescriptions  of  men;  how  that  spirit  wrought  as  a  simple  ob- 
ject lesson  in  the  life  of  the  Son  of  man.  What  can  pure  in- 
itiative, instinct  if  you  please,  when  vitalized  by  the  spirit  with- 
out measure,  be  trusted  to  do  in  the  realm  of  conduct;  or  in 
other  words,  when  it  makes  its  own  law  and  adopts,  or  over- 
rides, the  laws  already  in  the  field?  The  law  has  been  the 
great  world  burden.  The  spirit  is  the  great  emancipation. 
Shall  the  spirit  work  then  by  throwing  off  the  burden  and  ab- 
rogating law,  in  other  words  by  debasing  the  long  evolved  ideal 


222  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

of  living;  or  shall  it  confirm  and  exalt  the  law  by  stimulating 
men  to  do  more,  and  thus  stand  strong  and  loyal  under  the 
burden?  It  is  the  decision  of  this  alternative  that  we  look  for 
in  Christ's  life,  as  applied  to  the  laws  that  men  have  come  to 
reverence.  The  law  of  Christ,  —  what  shall  it  be?  Well,  St. 
Paul  sums  it  up  not  inaptly,  and  throws  a  gentle  radiance  over 
the  whole  ministry  of  Jesus,  when,  in  terms  of  exhortation,  he 
says,  "Bear  ye  one  another's  burdens,  and  so  fulfil  the  law  of 
Christ."  This  really  tells  the  whole  story  of  Him  who  emp- 
tied Himself  of  heavenly  distinction  and  dignity  in  order  to 
identify  Himself  with  the  estate  of  manhood.  Being  found  in 
fashion  as  a  man,  He  bore  the  burdens  of  a  man,  and  was  con- 
stant in  helping  others,  and  infused  the  spirit  of  rest  into  all 
who  came  to  Him  laboring  and  heavy  laden.  "For,"  said  He, 
"my  yoke  is  easy,  and  my  burden  is  light." 

Yet  this  was  no  truckling  or  nerveless  acquiescence;  it 
tingled  with  wisdom  and  searching  criticism  of  the  empire  of 
law;  nor  was  it  without  moments  of  flaming  indignation  di- 
rected especially  against  those  who  were  most  scrupulous  and 
strenuous  in  maintaining  the  law,  the  Scribes  and  Pharisees. 
He  was  an  iconoclast  as  truly  as  He  was  an  upbuilder.  It  is 
important  therefore  that  we  note,  in  this  new  light  of  the  spirit 
of  life,  both  what  He  built  up  and  what  He  tore  down,  in  His 
dealings  with  the  prevailing  structure  of  law. 

To  get  at  His  spirit  of  upbuilding,  of  uttermost  construc- 
tiveness,  we  do  best,  I  think,  to  interrogate  His  attitude  toward 
the  small  things  of  the  world's  rules  and  customs,  the  things 
that  because  they  are  insignificant  or  do  not  happen  to  apply 
to  us,  we  are  apt  to  neglect  or  disparage,  making  an  exception 
in  our  own  favor.  There  are  many  such  things;  in  fact,  for 
the  most  of  us,  the  law,  as  related  to  our  conduct,  is  almost 
wholly  made  up  of  such  little  observances.  We  never  figure 
in  police  and  court-room  annals;  the  big  laws  against  arson 
and  house-breaking  and  fraud  are  dead  letters  to  us,  wholly 
out  of  our  inner  world.  It  is  the  little  things,  the  trifles  about 
which  is  said  de  minimis  non  cur  at  lex,  the  law  does  not  care 
for  trifles,  and  which  can  be  measured  only  by  the  general 


THE  SUPREME  HISTORIC  VENTURE      223 

spirit  of  observance  or  transgression,  that  really  enter  into 
our  lives.  And  of  these  Jesus  taught  that  the  spirit  which  is 
tenderly  observant  of  these  small  things  is  really  the  largest, 
most  constructive  spirit;  He  singled  out,  you  remember,  as 
least  in  the  kingdom  of  heaven,  him  who  despised  one  of  the 
least  of  these  commandments  and  taught  men  so,  while  He 
called  men  great  in  the  kingdom  according  to  their  attitude 
toward  little  and  non-essential  things.  Get  the  spirit  of  your 
life  rightly  related  to  these,  and  the  essential  things  will  take 
care  of  themselves. 

And  so,  as  best  expressing  Jesus'  fundamental  attitude  to 
the  laws  and  rules  of  men,  I  have  chosen  the  remark  He  made 
in  answer  to  John  the  Baptist,  when  He  came  to  the  Jordan 
to  be  baptized.  The  rite  of  baptism,  as  John  had  instituted 
it,  connoted  sin  and  repentance;  it  was  the  act  by  which  men 
told  the  world  that  a  revolution  had  taken  place  in  them,  that 
they  had  broken  with  an  old  order  and  were  making  ready 
for  a  new  one.  In  Jesus,  as  soon  as  He  appeared,  John  recog- 
nized an  exception  to  this  rule,  an  exemption,  if  ever  there  was 
one,  from  the  requirement.  "I  have  need  to  be  baptized  of 
thee,"  he  said,  "and  comest  thou  to  me?"  Jesus  knew  this  as 
well  as  John;  He  knew  what  the  sound  sense  of  the  situation 
demanded.  What  a  chance  there  was  for  Him  here;  how 
easily  He  could  have  told  the  world  a  new  thing,  —  that  here 
among  them  at  last  was  sinlessness,  fulness  of  life,  perfect 
immunity  from  the  evils  and  depravities  of  the  human  lot,  and 
therefore  perfect  freedom  from  men's  blundering  laws  and 
institutions.  How  easily,  even  before  He  went  to  the  wilder- 
ness, He  could  have  yielded  to  the  second  temptation,  and 
emphasized  the  god!  But  no:  He  had  not  come  to  the  Jordan 
to  pose  as  an  exception  to  rules;  if  men  came  eventually  to 
recognize  His  godlikeness  it  must  be  by  another  way,  by  a 
way  in  which  they  also  might  be  included.  "Suffer  it  to  be 
so  now,"  was  His  reply  to  John,  "for  thus  it  becometh  us  to 
fulfil  all  righteousness."  What  depth  of  meaning  in  that  word 
"us"  here,  and  what  liberal  and  limitless  interpretation  of  that 
eternal  ideal  righteousness!  So  he  submitted  to  this  perfectly 


224  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

unnecessary  and  for  His  case  meaningless  thing,  in  order  to 
march  shoulder  to  shoulder  with  those  everywhere  on  whom 
life  had  imposed  prescriptions  of  law  and  rite  and  custom. 

This  was  not  a  solitary  example.  It  laid  hold  on  the  whole 
fibre  of  His  manhood  spirit.  A  later  incident  reveals  how  truly 
this  compliant  obedience  was  of  His  very  nature,  and  no  mere 
expediency  or  opportunism  conditioned  by  occasion.  The 
Jewish  officials  came  once  to  Him  and  His  disciples  to  collect 
the  temple-tax  of  half  a  shekel,  a  poll-tax  imposed  on  every 
member  of  the  state  church.  He  knew,  and  He  made  His  dis- 
ciples know,  that  as  Son  of  God  and  therefore  essential  Lord 
of  the  temple  He  was  exempt.  To  tax  Him  at  all  for  the  serv- 
ices wherein  His  was  the  spirit  to  be  worshipped  and  main- 
tained was  an  anomaly  and  an  affront;  and  to  pay  it  was  really 
to  buy  the  worship  of  Himself.  That  is  not  the  way,  He  said, 
that  kings  of  the  earth  do;  they  take  tribute  of  strangers,  and 
the  children  are  free.  True  worship,  if  it  is  anything  at  all,  is 
a  freedom,  a  spontaneous  uprise  of  heart.  There  was  a  prin- 
ciple at  stake  here;  as  truly  as  there  was  in  Boston  a  century 
and  more  ago,  when  our  forefathers  met  in  the  Old  South 
Church  and  refused  to  pay  the  tax  on  tea.  I  am  not  judging 
them.  But  what  does  He  do?  "Notwithstanding,"  He  says, 
"lest  we  should  offend  them,  go  thou,"  —  provide  the  money 
for  every  one  of  us  and  pay  the  tax.  Offend  them  —  whom? 
The  government  of  nation  and  church;  an  institution,  an  ab- 
straction you  say,  under  which,  if  men  can  make  their  case 
good,  a  great  many  feel  perfectly  free  to  declare  off  or  scale 
down  their  taxes.  Here  again  I  am  not  judging;  it  is  the 
spirit  of  the  thing  that  counts.  And  the  spirit  that  was  in  Him 
was  not  determined  by  this  or  that  opportunity,  this  or  that 
abstraction,  this  or  that  loop-hole  of  exception;  it  was  the 
intrinsic  spirit  of  love  itself,  which  is  as  mighty  to  abstain  from 
causing  offense,  as  it  is  to  exert  itself  positively.  And  it  was 
by  this  very  act  of  abstaining  from  offense,  of  guarding  His 
good  from  being  evil  spoken  of,  that  the  way  was  kept  open 
for  the  positive  beneficence  which  He  had  supremely  at  heart. 

In  fact,  this  whole  business  of  law,  so  far  as  men  can  embody 


THE  SUPREME  HISTORIC   VENTURE      225 

it  in  enactments  and  institutions,  is  mainly  an  affair  of  ab- 
staining, the  negative  matter  of  letting  your  neighbor  alone, 
so  that  he  can  be  as  free  to  live  as  you  are.  That  is  why  all 
the  old  commandments  are  couched  in  the  words  "Thou  shalt 
not."  They  are  adapted  to  a  lower  human  nature,  not  yet 
fit  for  freedom,  which  unless  restrained  would  tend  always  to 
molest  the  neighbor  and  make  his  life  and  property  insecure. 
The  law,  after  all,  is  only  the  established  way  of  clearing  the 
ground  so  that  love  to  neighbor,  when  it  is  positively  evolved, 
may  have  free  course.  And  so  it  is  an  embodied  prophecy  of 
the  coming  freedom;  a  prophecy  and  preparation.  But  the 
essential  command  of  the  developed  freedom  is  no  more  nega- 
tive but  positive,  "Thou  shalt";  it  is  the  outward  current  of 
spirit,  engaged  in  actual  service  and  upbuilding.  It  takes  men 
on  the  ground  of  their  higher  and  regenerate  nature,  and  sets 
that  in  motion.  This  is  what,  if  we  read  them  in  the  new  spirit, 
all  the  old  commands  really  meant.  "For  this,"  as  St.  Paul 
says,  "  'Thou  shalt  not  commit  adultery,  Thou  shalt  not  kill, 
Thou  shalt  not  steal,  Thou  shalt  not  bear  false  witness,  Thou 
shalt  not  covet,'  and  if  there  be  any  other  commandment,  it 
is  briefly  comprehended  in  this  saying,  namely,  'Thou  shalt 
love  thy  neighbor  as  thyself.'  Love  worketh  no  ill  to  his 
neighbor:  therefore  love  is  the  fulfilling  of  the  law."  And 
when  the  question  comes  up,  "Who  is  my  neighbor?"  you  re- 
member how  Jesus  answers  it.  Your  neighbor,  a  neighbor? 
Why,  every  one  who  has  the  spirit  of  loving-helpfulness  is  a 
neighbor;  a  Samaritan,  an  outcast,  just  as  truly  as  a  priest  or 
a  Levite;  there  is  no  aristocracy  or  foreign  element  here.  You 
recall  with  what  wonderful  skill,  in  His  parable  of  the  Good 
Samaritan,  Jesus  turned  the  point  of  His  critic's  question:  His 
answer  amounts  to  this,  It  is  your  business  not  to  hunt  up  a 
neighbor,  or  to  ask  whom  you  can  secure  that  will  neighbor 
you;  it  is  your  one  business  to  be  a  neighbor,  and  the  rest 
follows  of  itself.  And  however  far  upward  that  spirit  extended, 
He  never  limited  it.  Even  when  it  reached  the  source  of  law 
and  obligation,  that  abstraction  which  we  call  government, 
His  answer,  classic  for  all  time,  was,  "Render  therefore  unto 


226  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

Caesar  the  things  that  are  Caesar's,  and  unto  God  the  things 
that  are  God's.7'  It  is  all,  from  beginning  to  end,  a  free  render- 
ing, no  compulsion  or  evasion;  it  is  a  motion  of  the  law  of  the 
spirit  of  life. 

In  his  Sermon  on  the  Mount,  you  remember,  our  Lord  runs 
over  some  of  the  main  points  of  the  venerable  laws  and  customs 
in  which  He  finds  men  moving;  and  it  is  passing  wonderful 
how,  as  soon  as  He  touches  them,  He  lets  in  the  light  and  air 
of  the  spirit  upon  them,  so  that  things  fall  into  their  real  per- 
spective and  balance.  And  every  one  of  His  principles,  when 
He  says,  "Ye  have  heard  how  it  hath  been  said  of  old  time, 
.  .  .  but  /  say  unto  you,"  —  every  one  of  these  turns  on 
what  our  fellow  man  is  to  us,  and  what  our  inner  attitude  to 
him  is.  If  you  are  doing  your  duty  to  fellow  man  —  and  this 
is  what  ideal  law  connotes,  —  a  great  deal,  I  was  going  to  say 
everything,  depends  on  what  you  take  your  fellow  man  to  be. 
I  was  quoting,  you  remember,  Carlyle's  description  of  how  his 
friend  John  Sterling  entered  upon  the  life  in  the  world  that  his 
character  and  education  fitted  him  for.  From  this  description 
he  goes  on  to  say:  "For  alas,  the  world,  as  we  said,  already 
stands  convicted  to  this  young  soul  of  being  an  untrue,  un- 
blessed world;  its  high  dignitaries  many  of  them  phantasms 
and  players'  masks;  its  worthships  and  worships  unworship- 
ful:  from  Dan  to  Beersheba,  a  mad  world,  my  masters  .  .  . 
Truly,  in  all  times  and  places,  the  young  ardent  soul  that  enters 
on  this  world  with  heroic  purpose,  with  veracious  insight,  and 
the  yet  unclouded  'inspiration  of  the  Almighty'  which  has  given 
us  our  intelligence,  will  find  this  world  a  very  mad  one."  The 
world  is  indeed  a  fair  enough  place,  Carlyle  continues,  to  get 
rich  in,  or  to  raise  a  little  temporary  applause  of  flunkies  and 
toadies;  but  "for  any  other  human  aim,  I  think  you  will  find 
it  not  furthersome.  If  you  in  any  way  ask  practically,  How 
is  a  noble  life  to  be  led  in  it?  you  will  be  luckier  than  Sterling 
or  I  if  you  get  any  credible  answer,  or  find  any  made  road 
whatever."  A  promising  approach  to  the  world  this,  for  a 
young  man,  is  it  not,  to  presuppose  it  as  made  up  of  madmen 
and  fools,  and  you  the  only  sane  mind  in  it?  What  is  such 


THE  SUPREME  HISTORIC   VENTURE      227 

a  world  going  to  be,  in  its  response  to  you,  or  you  to  it,  in  the 
things  you  undertake  or  inculcate? 

Our  Lord's  polar  contrast  to  this  disparaging  attitude  illus- 
trates what  it  is  the  business  of  this  chapter  to  trace,  His  di- 
vine creative  faith  in  human  nature;  a  faith  which  goes 
beyond  man  as  He  finds  him,  as  far  as  eternity  beyond,  and 
adapts  its  working  to  the  nobility  of  nature  which  is  in  po- 
tency, and  which  through  the  power  of  that  faith  is  yet  some 
day  to  be.  And  His  attitude  toward  law,  in  accordance  with 
the  trend  of  law,  expresses  the  negative  side  of  this  faith, — 
what  man  is  not  to  be,  as  related  to  us.  He  begins  with  the 
greatest  crime  a  man  supposably  can  commit,  the  crime  of 
murder.  What  is  the  real  essence  of  murder?  If  you  kill,  He 
says,  you  have,  under  the  law,  put  yourself  in  danger  of  the 
judgment;  you  have  raised  the  question  how  far  you  are  or 
are  not  justified.  But  I  say  unto  you,  if  you  are  angry  with 
your  brother  causelessly,  and  call  him  Raca,  a  good  for 
nothing,  treating  him  so,  you  are  in  danger  of  a  higher  judg- 
ment, the  inner  verdict  of  the  spirit;  and  if  you  call  a  man  a 
fool  and  treat  him  so,  you  are  in  danger  of  a  great  deal  fierier 
thing  than  judgment;  it  is  the  worst  way  of  killing  him,  so 
far  as  you  are  concerned,  for  it  puts  him  with  the  brutes  and 
cuts  off  his  chances  of  life  altogether.  This  strikes  a  pretty 
high  standard,  to  begin  with;  but  from  this  He  goes  on  to  even 
graver  things.  He  next  raises  the  question,  How  shall  you 
treat  that  woman,  any  woman,  no  matter  whom?  Shall  you 
treat  her  as  if  she  were  not  even  so  high  as  a  fool,  but  only  a 
soulless  thing,  to  minister  merely  to  your  wanton  lusts?  Well 
then,  you  have  broken  the  commandment,  in  the  very  worst 
way.  How  shall  you  treat  that  wife  of  yours,  that  divinely 
ordained  partner  of  your  life  and  lot?  Shall  you  treat  her  as 
if  she  were  only  a  slave,  or  a  casual  toy,  whom,  as  soon  as 
she  does  not  furnish  all  the  congeniality  and  domestic  mating 
you  crave,  you  may  heartlessly  turn  away,  into  all  the  risks 
of  destitution  and  sin?  Why,  just  as  every  man  is  your 
brother,  so  that  woman,  whoever  she  is  and  whatever  her  legal- 
ized relation,  is  your  sister,  one  of  the  same  great  family,  a 


228  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

potential  temple  of  the  same  spirit  that  dwells  in  you.  Let 
therefore  that  spirit  at  its  best,  which  is  the  spirit  of  universal 
love,  have  free,  patient,  forgiving  course;  and  be  not  too  ready 
to  forbid  its  working.  It  comes  back,  after  all,  not  to  her  but 
to  you;  are  you  able  to  bear  your  weight  on  that  spirit?  Then 
a  step  further  still  He  goes,  and  brings  the  solution  of  it  all 
in  view.  How  shall  you  treat  that  enemy  of  yours  —  no  fool 
or  soulless  thing  this  time,  but  in  active  hatred  and  malice 
against  you?  Here  is  your  chance  to  treat  men  as  they  ac- 
tually are.  Well  now,  are  you  going  to  hate  him  back  again, 
giving  as  good  as  you  get?  Why,  then,  you  are  weakly  letting 
him  set  the  copy  for  you  to  live  by.  Your  regard  for  him  is 
just  as  big  as  his  for  you,  no  bigger;  and  so  your  treatment 
is  just  the  same  as  the  old  crude  notion  of  an  eye  for  an  eye 
and  a  tooth  for  a  tooth.  Is  it  for  you,  in  your  adult  ideal  of 
life,  to  be  such  a  helpless  echo  of  another  that  you  cannot  love 
him  until  he  begins  the  game  and  loves  you,  or  do  him  a  good 
turn  until  he  has  virtually  compelled  it  by  doing  good  to  you? 
Why,  sinners  and  publicans,  the  very  outcasts  do  as  much  as 
that.  What  thanks  have  you,  what  surplusage  and  overflow  of 
life,  if  you  do  no  more  than  that?  That  is  not  the  copy  that  is 
set  for  your  living.  Look  up  to  the  God  who  made  you  and 
him,  and  in  whose  creative  love  all  your  life  has  grown  and 
thriven.  He  is  all  the  while  sending  His  sun  and  rain  on  the 
evil  and  the  good,  on  the  just  and  the  unjust  alike;  even  in 
their  blasphemy  and  rebellion  they  are  living  on  His  unweary- 
ing grace.  There  is  your  copy.  There  is  the  law  of  your  adult 
manhood.  Be  ye  therefore  perfect,  even  as  your  Father  in 
heaven  is  perfect.  A  tremendously  high  standard  this,  I 
grant  you;  but  not  to  be  like  Him,  when  you  see  Him  as  He 
is,  is  to  be  like  a  publican  and  a  sinner,  is  to  be  less 
than  your  accepted  standard,  your  legal  standard  even,  of  the 
human. 

So  then,  by  Jesus'  estimate,  it  ministers  neither  to  life  nor 
law  to  treat  the  world  of  men  like  fools  or  things  or  aliens  or 
enemies;  what  if,  as  Carlyle  assumes,  it  is  "a  mad  world,  my 
masters"?  The  dictate  of  this  new  pulsation  of  faith,  so  di- 


THE  SUPREME  HISTORIC   VENTURE      229 

vinely  unreasonable,  is  not  at  all  what  the  world  is  but  what 
you  are,  and  what  your  brave  insight  sees  the  world,  far  hence, 
to  be  capable  of  being,  —  capable  because  it  is  your  family 
and  you,  as  brother  of  the  world,  are  capable.  But  this,  you 
say,  produces  a  misfit  of  conditions.  Yes:  it  does.  It  was 
just  to  this  misfit  of  conditions  that  Christ,  in  His  supreme 
historic  venture,  committed  Himself.  He  was  courageously 
working  for  the  far  result;  was  sowing  the  seed  of  love  and 
faith  which  would  little  by  little  germinate  into  a  springtide 
and  harvest  of  new  life.  What  a  tremendous  originality  and 
initiative  in  it  all !  He  knew  how  the  first  generation,  His  own 
contemporaries,  took  it  and  would  take  it;  knew  what  is  in  the 
childish  heart  of  man  always.  They  were  like  children  sitting 
in  the  market-places  and  peevishly  reproaching  their  fellows 
for  not  playing  as  they  wanted.  John  the  Baptist  was  too 
austere  and  ascetic;  and  you  would  think  they  wanted  nothing 
but  gaiety  and  comradeship.  Jesus  was  a  comrade,  entering 
into  all  the  amenities  of  society  and  eating  and  drinking;  and 
you  never  saw  such  ascetic  people  as  they  wanted  to  be;  all 
his  good  fellowship  was  to  them  only  gluttony  and  winebibbing. 
There  is  the  childish  in  man  to  be  reckoned  with;  to  go  con- 
sistently on  your  own  higher  way  of  life  runs  all  the  risk  of 
being  a  misfit.  But  wisdom  is  justified  of  her  children;  the 
leaven  of  the  kingdom  will  work  unseen;  and  here  and  there 
men  who  will  stop  being  childish  long  enough  to  be  really  child- 
like will  find  that  the  power  of  that  strong  consistent  love  and 
faith  which  makes  them  dare  to  live  their  life  as  it  ought  to 
be  lived,  is  their  one  hope,  their  one  open  door  of  salvation. 
Think  then  how  much  it  means,  that  when  Jesus  put  Himself 
under  the  law  of  His  kind,  He  did  not  treat  His  kind  as  de- 
praved and  corrupt,  as  law-breakers  and  sinners,  but  rather 
as  heirs  of  a  limitless  potency  of  life.  And  as  the  foundation 
of  His  theology  He  lays  it  on  us  to  treat  men  likewise,  and 
to  dare  the  consequences.  Does  it  not  look,  friends,  as  if,  when 
we  read  His  life  in  its  large  proportions,  we  must  change  the 
centre  of  gravity  of  our  whole  dogmatic  system?  Have  we 
not  tried  to  save  men  by  cobbling  and  patching-up  work  long 


230  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

enough?  Does  not  the  time  past  suffice  us  to  have  treated 
our  brother's  human  heart  as  deceitful  above  all  things  and 
desperately  wicked,  —  whether  it  is  so  or  not?  It  is  time,  I 
think,  to  try  Christ's  way,  the  way  of  divinely  directed  spiri- 
tual evolution,  whereby  the  law  of  His  being  is  fulfilled  by 
the  outward  current  of  grace.  That  is  what  it  amounts  to. 

To  me  one  of  the  most  touching  incidents  of  our  Lord's 
whole  life  is  that  single  gesture  recorded  of  Him  when  they 
brought  Him  the  woman  taken  in  adultery.  There  they  stood, 
sinners  all,  looking  in  ill-concealed  glee  to  see  what  judgment 
He  would  pronounce  on  their  broken  law.  There  was  she, 
guilty  and  ashamed,  expecting  that  this  holiest  Being  of  all 
would  the  next  moment  give  the  word  that  would  put  her  out 
of  life.  It  was  a  moment  big  with  suspense  and  heart-search- 
ing. "But  Jesus  stooped  down,  and  with  his  fingers  wrote  on 
the  ground,  as  though  he  heard  them  not."  What  did  He 
write?  men  have  curiously  asked  and  conjectured;  He  of  whom 
this  is  the  only  record  of  writing,  He  who  alone  is  authorized 
to  write  the  sentence  by  which  the  whole  world  is  judged. 
Many  are  the  answers  given,  according  as  men  read  the  mind 
of  Christ.  Did  He  write  their  sentence  there?  Not  so:  rather, 
they  wrote  it  themselves,  in  their  guilty  slinking  away,  just 
as  soon  as  He  spoke  again.  Was  it  then  an  evasion  on  His 
part,  whether  because  He  was  at  loss  what  to  say,  or  because 
He  would  not  give  words  to  His  indignation?  Or  was  He,  as 
some  think,  hiding  the  blush  that  rose  to  His  face  at  thought 
of  the  whole  shameless  business?  None  of  these  conjectures 
are  satisfying,  and  perhaps  we  are  over  curious  to  inquire  at 
all.  It  has  always  seemed  to  me  as  if  this  simple  act  were 
His  way  of  keeping  silent  about  the  shame  that  He  found  in 
His  adopted  family  of  man;  as  if  when  they  would  force  Him 
to  declare  judgment  He  would  not  bring  Himself  to  tell  tales 
out  of  school.  If  we  all  are  reticent  about  our  domestic  af- 
fairs, and  especially,  as  the  phrase  is,  will  not  wash  our  dirty 
linen  in  public,  would  we  expect  Him,  the  most  tactful  and 
charitable  of  all,  to  blurt  our  human  baseness  to  the  universe? 
His  silence  was  His  loyal  reticence  about  the  adopted  family, 


THE  SUPREME  HISTORIC   VENTURE      231 

His  brothers  and  sisters,  for  whom  by  His  faith  He  would  hold 
the  gate  of  life  always  open. 

Yet,  as  I  have  intimated,  this  very  Son  of  man  did  not 
scruple  to  be  a  flagrant  law-breaker  and  iconoclast,  when  men's 
laws  had  ceased  to  be  God's  law,  and  no  longer  ministered  to 
life.  The  life  of  man  was  the  supreme  concern,  not  the  law. 
So  it  came  about  that  the  very  law  by  which  the  Scribes  and 
Pharisees  set  most  store,  and  which  perhaps  they  had  reduced 
to  the  minutest  and  exactest  enactment,  was  the  law  that  He 
cast  bluntly  back  in  their  teeth  as  an  unholy  thing.  I  refer  to 
His  treatment  of  the  prescribed  Sabbath  observance.  Here 
was  a  law  that  could  be  accurately  codified.  The  elders  could 
measure  off  just  how  many  inches  a  man  might  travel,  just 
what  things  he  might  and  might  not  eat,  just  what  he  might 
do  about  cooking  and  dressing  and  visiting  and  worshipping 
and  working;  it  was  all  capable  of  iron-bound  rules.  And 
being  so  exact  on  the  side  of  the  letter,  it  was  equally  suscep- 
tible to  evasions  and  accommodations  and  scalings-down,  when 
one  had  not  the  spirit  of  it  in  his  heart.  Our  Lord,  you  know, 
went  on  doing  His  works  of  mercy  without  stopping  to  in- 
quire what  day  it  was,  and  when  His  disciples  were  hungry 
let  them  pluck  the  corn  and  eat;  to  Him  the  day  was  just  as 
sacred,  and  just  as  great  an  opportunity,  as  any  day.  This 
exasperated  them;  it  did  not  beseem  a  prophet  and  teacher  of 
men;  did  not  make  the  Sabbath  sanctified  enough,  in  other 
words  gloomy  and  lazy  and  useless  enough,  to  suit  them.  What 
is  a  holy  day  for,  except  to  be  useless  to  any  one  but  God? 
Well,  you  remember  what  an  arrant  Sabbath-breaker  He  was; 
and  how  consistently  He  devoted  the  day  not  to  excuses  for 
laziness  and  austerity  but  to  royal  opportunities  for  man's 
highest  work,  his  work  of  helpfulness  and  mercy,  which  can 
be  so  much  better  done  then  as  he  has  not  the  cares  of  daily 
livelihood  to  interfere.  "My  Father  worketh  hitherto,"  He 
said,  "and  I  work."  One  is  holy  enough  for  that  or  any  day, 
if  he  does  as  God  does.  So  His  ideal  was  not  to  break 
the  Sabbath  but  to  fulfil  it  by  putting  it  to  the  highest  uses 
after  which  a  true  man's  life  yearns  and  longs;  to  make  it  the 


232  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

best  day  by  doing  the  most  godlike  things.  That  he  will  do, 
if  it  is  supremely  in  him  to  do  it.  It  comes  back,  after  all,  to 
the  spirit  of  man.  You  cannot  make  a  man  keep  the  Sabbath 
by  legislating  a  Sabbath;  and  a  man  cannot  keep  the  Sabbath 
by  going  through  external  motions,  however  pious,  or  even  by 
lying  abed  all  day.  If  it  is  separated  from  other  days  it  must 
be  separated  on  some  other  principle.  It  comes  back  to  the 
spirit  of  the  man  himself;  the  active,  unforced,  spontaneous 
spirit  of  life.  When  the  apostle  John  Eliot,  at  Newton,  tried 
to  evangelize  the  Indians,  it  is  said  he  had  very  little  difficulty 
in  persuading  them  to  rest  on  the  Sabbath;  the  real  difficulty 
came  in  when  he  tried  to  get  them  to  work  on  any  other  day. 
There  was  the  rub;  I  don't  think,  however,  we  would  call  it 
too  much  Sabbath,  but  too  little  man.  As  for  the  Mosaic 
Sabbath,  the  day  of  rest,  —  well,  there  are  two  ways  of  getting 
at  that.  One  is,  if  the  bent  is  in  you  to  be  useless,  to  make  it 
a  day  of  cessation  and  inaction;  the  other  is,  to  make  it  a  day 
when,  like  a  sweet  home-coming  and  recreation,  it  is  rest  and 
refreshment  to  you  to  do  the  highest  manhood  work.  The 
Sabbath  was  made  for  man,  for  man  at  his  best,  not  man  for 
the  Sabbath.  And  what  that  noblest  manhood  work  is,  we 
have  the  life  of  the  Son  of  man  to  answer,  and  the  restful  work 
of  love  that  He  never  ceased  to  do.  "Therefore,"  He  says, 
"the  Son  of  man  is  Lord  also  of  the  sabbath."  I  think  the 
Christian  world  has  done  not  unwisely,  by  changing  the  day 
of  the  week  and  the  name  of  the  day,  to  transfer  our  holy  day 
from  the  ideal  of  cessation  to  the  perpetual  ideal  of  the  highest 
to  which  the  Son  of  man  may  rise,  the  ideal  of  resurrection 
to  new  life;  I  think  it  not  only  immensely  hallows  the  day, 
but  better  fulfils  the  Mosaic  law  of  rest  too.  Here  therefore, 
as  otherwhere,  our  Lord  came  not  to  destroy  but  to  fulfil. 

Our  Lord's  severest  denunciations  were  directed  against 
those  leaders  and  pace-setters  of  society  who  would  take  oc- 
casion of  their  position  to  bind  grievous  burdens  upon  men, 
and  then  not  stir  a  finger  to  lift  such  burdens  themselves. 
"Shall  not  the  Judge  of  all  the  earth  do  right?"  Abraham  had 
once  asked  of  God.  Shall  not  the  judges  and  guides  of  men 


THE   SUPREME  HISTORIC   VENTURE      233 

obey  their  own  laws?  It  is  a  very  easy  and  hypocritical  thing 
to  live  under  an  empire  of  law  if  the  other  fellow  is  to  do  all 
the  obedience.  Jesus'  sympathies  were  always  with  the  under 
man,  the  bearer  of  the  burden,  the  man  whose  business  it  was 
to  be  governed;  He  would  begin  with  this  man  because  He 
would  make  the  law  of  his  being  sound  all  the  way  up.,  from 
bottom  to  top.  Into  this  essential  man  He  would  breathe  the 
spirit  which  would  enable  him,  in  a  new  athletic  vitality,  both 
to  make  and  to  keep  his  own  law.  The  law  itself  would  turn 
out  to  be  the  same  old  law  of  manhood  which  the  ages  had 
already  hallowed  as  the  law  of  God,  only  transfigured,  quick- 
ened, made  self-acting;  and  this  it  would  be  by  being  taken 
in  on  the  way,  as  man  commits  himself  to  the  full  outward 
current  of  life,  the  current  of  grace,  love,  forgiveness,  brother- 
hood. This  is  what  it  all  mounts  up  to.  The  law  is  there, 
intact,  no  jot  nor  tittle  lacking;  but  it  has  become  a  thing  of 
course,  an  incident  of  life.  In  the  life  of  brother  love  there  is 
no  more  call  to  bother  about  rules  of  living  than  there  is  to 
take  thought  for  breathing  or  digestion.  As  a  body  of  pre- 
scribed rules  telling  you  what  not  to  do,  the  old  law  is  dead; 
not,  however,  because  it  is  abrogated,  but  because  it  is  buried 
up  in  the  natural  functions  of  life. 

In  the  ancient  prophetic  ideal  it  was  said  of  the  Servant  of 
Jehovah  who  was  to  come:  "The  Lord  is  well  pleased  for  his 
righteousness'  sake;  he  will  magnify  the  law,  and  make  it 
honorable."  And  is  it  not  so?  The  self -regarding  leaders  of 
Israel,  priests  though  they  were  and  endlessly  self-righteous, 
had  run  their  law  into  pettiness  and  limitations;  had  fenced 
it  round  everywhere  with  puerile  interpretations,  which  were 
one  and  all  like  breathing-places  where  a  man  could  stop  obey- 
ing and  begin  to  evade  or  accommodate.  They  had  belittled 
the  significance  of  the  very  terms  they  used;  like  the  French, 
whose  word  homage  is  attenuated  to  mean  outward  flattery  of 
women,  and  whose  word  vertu  is  whittled  down  to  a  fine  piece 
of  furniture  or  old  china.  What  do  you  suppose  the  upper 
class  of  Jews  called  righteousness?  They  gave  the  name  to 
alms-giving;  that  was  doing  righteousness;  and  when  our  Lord 


234  THE   LIFE   INDEED 

tells  His  disciples  not  to  do  their  alms  before  men  to  be  seen 
of  them,  He  uses  the  current  term,  telling  them  not  to  do  their 
righteousness  in  that  way.  Righteousness,  that  far  ideal  of 
truest  living,  had  become  largely  a  thing  done  for  show,  like 
a  contribution  to  charity,  a  thing  in  which  it  was  quite  feasible 
for  the  spirit  not  to  go  along  with  it  at  all,  but  just  to  send  a 
check  —  and  get  a  popular  credit  on  the  books  for  beneficence. 
Why,  the  poor  widow  with  her  two  mites,  all  she  had,  was  do- 
ing more  righteousness  than  the  whole  crowd  of  them.  And 
so  He  told  His  disciples,  whom  He  was  educating  in  the  spirit, 
that  except  their  righteousness  exceeded  the  righteousness  of 
the  Scribes  and  Pharisees  the  kingdom  of  heaven  was  no  place 
for  them.  For  the  thing  that  He  had  unearthed  in  their  lives 
was,  not  only  that  their  petty  interpretations  and  restrictions 
had  belittled  the  whole  scheme  of  the  law  ideal,  but  that  they 
had  honeycombed  it  with  hypocrisies.  He  told  His  disciples 
to  beware  of  their  "leaven,"  which  is  hypocrisy;  all  that  silent 
pervasive  ferment  of  influence  and  spirit,  which  we  figure  by 
leaven,  and  which  is  the  most  beautiful  illustration,  on  the 
true-hearted  scale,  of  the  growing  kingdom  of  heaven,  was  in 
them  an  unreal  thing,  a  lie,  making  a  pretense  of  things  that 
are  not.  The  Greek  word  for  hypocrisy,  you  know,  is  the 
word  that  they  use  for  play-acting;  an  actor,  whose  business 
it  was  to  represent  the  shows  of  things,  was  in  their  language 
a  hypocrite.  So  His  indictment  against  the  Scribes  and  Phar- 
isees was  that  they  were  living  a  put-on  life,  pretending  to  be 
righteous  while  they  were  not,  and  putting  their  righteousness 
into  the  concrete  observances  that  men  could  see  and  applaud. 
And  all  the  while  there  stood  the  law  of  righteousness  ma- 
jestic before  them,  confessed  in  their  words  and  their  fashions, 
a  silent  monument  of  the  homage  that  the  counterfeit  always 
pays  to  the  true.  We  do  not  counterfeit  worthless  things  but 
valuable  things;  our  hypocrisies  are  our  testimony  to  the  law 
of  truth,  that  it  is  holy  and  just  and  good.  But  with  Jesus, 
the  true  Servant  of  Jehovah,  the  ancient  prophecy  has  come 
true,  by  the  plain  and  sterling  way  of  the  inner  spirit.  "He 
will  magnify  the  law,  and  make  it  honorable."  With  Him  it 


THE  SUPREME  HISTORIC   VENTURE      235 

has  become  a  thing  large  and  universal,  a  law  of  highest  na- 
ture; no  longer  a  thing  for  the  under  man  to  groan  under  and 
for  the  upper  man  to  evade  and  falsify;  no  longer  an  affair  of 
codes  and  fine  distinctions,  as  if  it  were  a  thing  made  out  of 
paper;  and  no  longer  restrictive  at  all,  nor  any  bridle  on  the 
free  spirit  of  man,  which  is  the  spirit  of  brotherhood.  Its  very 
negative  trend,  its  "thou  shalt  not,"  has  become  the  fine  and 
delicate  tact  of  Him  who  will  no  wise  hurt  or  offend.  So  in 
the  honorable  relations  of  man  and  man  which  it  establishes, 
when  observed  in  the  spirit,  we  know  now  for  the  first  time  in 
history  what  its  supreme  ideal,  righteousness,  means. 

III.      TO    THIS    END    WAS    I    BORN 

i 

Very  evidently  it  is  a  King  of  men  who  is  moving  so  calmly 
and  genially  among  us;  the  more  kingly  as  His  presence  is 
more  approachable,  and  as  by  His  impact  on  every  individual 
heart  He  works  to  make  His  realm  a  veritable  democracy  of 
kings  and  priests.  We  have  seen  it  in  the  laws  He  reaffirms 
and  interprets,  and  in  the  steady  attitude  of  upbuilding  which 
He  has  at  heart.  We  are  to  ask  now  how  He  Himself  defined 
all  this,  and  what  end  of  it  He  set  before  Him.  His  plans  were 
broadly  laid.  He  came  down  from  the  exceeding  high  moun- 
tain not  only  with  a  plan  of  life  which  could  be  carried  out  in 
humility  and  open-hear tedness,  but  with  a  plan  of  empire.  We 
cannot,  as  some  do,  think,  with  the  words  "Thou  art  my  be- 
loved Son"  in  our  ears,  that  His  career  was  in  any  sense  an 
accident  or  a  makeshift.  When  the  temporary  emergency 
arose  He  indeed  did,  as  the  old  phrase  is,  "the  next  thing"; 
but  it  was  always  both  the  preordained  thing  and  the  most 
far-reaching  thing,  a  thing  which  never  had  to  be  undone. 
Every  event  in  His  ministry,  being  an  event  of  the  typical  man- 
hood ,  came  to  stay. 

The  upbuilding,  vitalizing  agency  on  which  He  relied,  as  we 
have  abundantly  seen,  was  simply  love,  or  as  St.  John  calls  it, 
grace:  which  is  just  love  initiative,  love  which  does  not  wait 
for  merit  or  dignity  or  loveliness  to  call  it  forth,  and  which 


236  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

does  not  make  demands  or  conditions,  but  exerts  itself  un- 
provoked out  of  its  own  infinite  fulness,  which  is  identified 
with  the  creative  and  upholding  power  of  the  universe.  It  is 
this  grace  that  He  lives;  this  that  He  brings  in  all  lowly  offices 
of  good  to  His  neighbors  and  to  needy  ones;  this,  in  its  ap- 
plication all  the  way  from  kinsman  to  enemy,  that  He  lays  as 
ideal  on  all  who  would  learn  of  Him.  This  was  the  initial 
kingliness  He  brought  to  men;  this,  in  application,  constituted 
His  social  norm  and  code  of  law. 

But  this  new  way  of  treating  men,  inoffensive  as  it  was  and 
the  highest  note  of  evolution,  could  not  have  undisturbed 
course.  The  very  contrast  it  made  men  aware  of  in  their  own 
hearts  would  of  necessity  make  it  a  standing  reproach  to  their 
ways,  and  so  cause  reaction.  Too  evidently,  at  the  first  im- 
pact, it  would  not  bring  peace  on  earth,  but  a  sword.  There- 
fore such  love  to  men  must  have  not  only  impulse  but  staying- 
power.  As  some  one  has  expressed  it,  "An  icy  air  and  the 
hard  rock  of  selfishness  were  conditions  which  hindered  the 
growth  of  the  germ  which  lay  in  the  creation."  Besides,  in 
the  view  of  things  to  which  men  were  used,  the  very  complete- 
ness of  that  grace  seemed  an  element  of  weakness;  it  was  so 
tender,  so  undemanding,  seemed  as  it  were  a  kind  of  collapse 
of  the  whole  pride  of  aggressive  manhood.  To  this  day  we  all 
find  it  the  hardest  thing  in  the  world  to  incorporate  in  our  na- 
ture. Men  can  so  override  it,  so  take  advantage  of  it,  so  trade 
upon  it,  as  if  having  only  grace  to  play  against  they  had  all 
the  tricks  of  the  game  in  their  own  hands.  A  schemer,  or  a 
bunco  man,  it  would  seem,  could  not  desire  a  more  facile  prey 
than  this  offers;  so  apparently  unsuspicious  that  all  the  zest 
is  taken  out  of  the  game.  And  so  of  those  who  are  good  with- 
out any  spice  of  malice  or  retaliation  we  get  up  a  proverb,  say- 
ing, "So  good  that  he  is  good  for  nothing,"  and  think  there  is 
something  lacking  in  their  brain;  and  of  ourselves  we  say, 
"Yes,  I  can  forgive,  and  I  can  love  my  enemy,  up  to  a  certain 
point,  but"  —  and  that  but  sets  a  limit,  lower  or  higher,  where 
we  can  stop  loving  and  begin  to  pay  the  world  off  in  its  own 
coin.  We  have  moments  when,  as  to  Machiavelli  it  seems  to 


THE  SUPREME  HISTORIC   VENTURE      237 

us,  "That  the  Christian  faith  has  given  up  good  men  in  prey 
to  those  that  are  tyrannical  and  unjust";  and  we  subscribe 
heartily  to  Lord  Bacon's  wise  advice:  "Seek  the  good  of  other 
men,  but  be  not  in  bondage  to  their  faces  or  fancies;  for  that 
is  but  facility  or  softness;  which  taketh  an  honest  mind  pris- 
oner." There  is  an  authentic  strain  of  integral  human  nature 
to  reckon  with  here:  our  grace,  our  goodness,  must  be  wise, 
must  be  an  art  of  goodness,  with  tools,  for  all  our  strong 
personality  to  use,  and  sphere  for  all  our  skill  and  tact  to 
work  in. 

How  shall  Jesus  meet  this  reaction  which  His  grace  is  so 
sure  to  induce,  meet  it  so  that  in  the  long  run  His  meekness 
and  humility  shall  not  go  under  but  survive  and  conquer? 
Shall  He  be  gracious  and  nothing  else,  or  must  something  more 
be  added,  to  complete  the  endowment  of  the  Son  of  man;  and 
if  so,  what? 

St.  John,  you  remember,  in  speaking  of  the  Word  made  flesh, 
adds  another  element  to  the  account.  There  He  stood  among 
men,  God's  idea  spelled  out  in  human  life,  and  we  beheld  His 
glory,  so  pure  and  perfect  that  we  saw  therein  the  only-be- 
gotten Son  of  God;  and  the  life  He  lived  was  full  of  grace  and 
truth.  This  characteristic  was  what  differentiated  His  era 
from  the  old  dispensation:  the  law  was  given  by  Moses,  but 
grace  and  truth  came  by  Jesus  Christ.  We  have  seen  the  grace 
in  practical  working;  going  about  doing  good,  healing  diseases, 
announcing  goodwill  to  men,  as  if  these  were  all  it  had  to  do. 
And  we  have  seen  how  lamblike  and  apparently  defenseless 
such  grace  is  against  the  evil  onsets  of  men.  What  now  shall 
we  make  of  this  second  element,  this  supplementing  endowment 
of  truth,  added  to  grace?  St.  John,  who  for  all  his  mystic  and 
poetic  strain  was  a  keen  thinker  in  a  logic  of  his  own,  has  the 
most  to  say  about  truth  of  any  of  the  New  Testament  writers; 
it  is  through  him  that  we  get  the  term  and  the  large  idea.  But 
it  is  a  tissue  of  many  threads,  both  of  thought  and  of  life; 
and  the  other  evangelists,  though  they  do  not  make  such  free 
use  of  the  name,  contribute  their  part,  as  important  as  St. 
John's,  especially  in  their  record  of  the  deeds  He  did,  and  in 


238  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

their  revelation  of  His  mind,  which  merits  no  less  absolute 
name  than  the  truth  of  life. 

Along  in  the  middle  of  His  ministry,  or  a  little  beyond,  there 
came  to  Jesus  what  we  may  call  an  enlargement  of  scale:  His 
realization  of  His  mission  broadened  and  deepened;  this  we 
may  say,  whatever  view  we  take  of  Him,  for  like  all  of  us  He 
lived  and  learned,  learning  obedience  by  the  things  He  suffered. 
An  untold  shock  it  must  have  been  to  Him,  that  single-hearted 
villager  working  in  such  purity  of  love  and  faith,  when  the 
elders  and  scholars  of  the  nation  called  it  all  devil's  work  and 
interpreted  it  by  Beelzebub  the  prince  of  devils.  It  was  this, 
you  know,  that  called  forth  His  warning  about  the  sin  against 
the  Holy  Spirit  which  could  not  be  forgiven;  to  Him  it  was 
like  an  utter  reversal  of  the  laws  of  being.  To  think  that  the 
accredited  guides  and  leaders,  in  whose  keeping  were  the  ruling 
standards  and  sentiments  of  men,  should  read  life  by  the  polar 
opposite  of  the  real  truth,  was  the  sharpest  stab  that  could 
have  been  given  to  His  sensitive  spirit.  At  that  point  a  gap 
must  needs  open  between  Him  and  His  beloved  nation,  that 
nation  of  which  He  had  said,  "salvation  is  of  the  Jews."  Soon 
after  this  rebuff  He  extended  His  journeying  into  the  coasts 
of  Syro-Phenicia,  the  only  occasion  in  His  ministry,  so  far  as 
we  know,  when  He  went  beyond  Jewish  soil  and  came  in  con- 
tact with  a  foreign  nation.  And  there,  you  remember,  He  found 
hearts  just  as  hungry  for  life,  and  just  as  responsive  to  His 
healing  power,  as  He  had  found  in  Galilee.  The  Syro-Pheni- 
cian  woman,  who  would  not  accept  His  word,  "It  is  not  meet 
to  take  the  children's  bread  and  give  it  to  the  dogs,"  but  was 
eager,  like  the  dogs,  to  take  some  crumbs  from  the  Master's 
table,  —  this  woman  conquered  by  her  faith,  and  thus  proved 
to  His  ever-open  heart  that  foreigners  too  and  heathen,  alien 
in  thought  and  antecedents,  were  just  as  truly  open  to  the 
light  He  brought,  and  just  as  capable  of  assimilating  His  way 
of  life,  as  were  the  lost  sheep  of  the  house  of  Israel.  This 
discovery,  though  He  had  all  the  germs  and  premonitions  of 
it  before,  produced  a  great  enlargement  of  His  scale  of  things; 
henceforth  the  whole  world,  and  not  a  mere  Jewish  corner  of 


THE  SUPREME  HISTORIC  VENTURE      239 

it,  was  the  sphere  of  His  love  and  power.  What  if  now  the 
Jews  did  reject  Him,  and  what  if  this  contemporary  genera- 
tion should  vent  upon  Him  all  their  malice  and  caprice,  doing 
with  Him  as  they  listed,  the  same  as  they  had  done  to  John  the 
Baptist?  He  had  come  in  sight  of  a  larger  outlet  of  life, 
broader  and  loftier  than  could  be  cramped  down  to  space  and 
time,  or  thwarted  by  the  prevailing  evil  of  men.  He  had  dis- 
covered that  this  life  of  His  was  adapted  to  work  universally, 
and  that  the  deep  heart  of  man,  wherever  and  whenever  the 
life  found  it,  had  the  susceptibility  to  lay  hold  of  it  and  live. 
And  we  may  be  sure  He  was  not  slow  to  grasp  and  formulate 
the  meaning  of  all  this. 

That  it  worked  on  His  heart  and  engendered  great  thoughts 
we  know  from  the  question  that  He  asked  His  disciples  on  His 
way  back  from  this  foreign  trip.  Then  it  was,  it  would  seem, 
that  the  tremendous  idea  of  Messiahship  came  into  His  mind; 
He  had  hardly  brought  Himself  to  cherish  it  before,  at  least 
for  Himself;  He  would  not,  until  He  had  felt  His  way  and 
knew  He  was  right.  And  when  now  He  did  broach  the  idea, 
it  was  not  by  assertion;  that  was  never  His  way;  but  by  get- 
ting the  opinion  of  those  who,  being  always  with  Him,  were 
best  able  to  judge.  "Whom  do  men  say  that  I,  the  Son  of  man, 
am?"  The  disciples  gave  Him  various  answers,  floating 
opinions  like  gossip,  all  more  or  less  vague  and  laden  with 
crude  superstitions.  Some,  they  said,  called  Him  John  the 
Baptist,  come  back  from  death  to  finish  his  work;  some,  Eli- 
jah, the  prophesied  forerunner;  some,  Jeremiah,  come  again 
perhaps  to  bring  back  the  ark  and  the  holy  vessels  which  he 
had  hid  in  a  cave;  and  still  others,  one  of  the  ancient  prophets 
come  to  revive  the  prophetic  word  so  long  silent.  None  had 
made  any  large  or  lucid  interpretation  of  Him.  "But  whom 
say  ye  that  I  am?"  He  asked;  and  when  one  of  them,  Peter, 
answered,  "Thou  art  the  Christ,  the  Son  of  the  living  God," 
His  reply,  so  accordant  with  the  thought  that  was  surging  in 
Jesus'  heart,  was  hailed  as  a  discovery  revealed  not  by  flesh 
and  blood  but  by  the  Father  in  heaven  Himself.  But  He 
charged  them  to  tell  no  man  that  He  was  Jesus  the  Christ; 


240  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

the  thing  was  too  sacred  to  be  thrown  like  an  idle  gossip  to  the 
raw  crude  conceptions  of  men,  or  to  make  its  way  by  proclama- 
tion, with  its  inevitable  uprisings  and  revolutions;  it  must 
come  to  them  by  the  way  of  their  own  hearts,  as  it  had  come 
to  Him  and  Peter,  and  come  only  as  their  hearts  were  large 
enough  to  interpret  the  real  glory  of  it. 

Here  I  must  speak  of  an  interpretation,  lately  promulgated, 
which  I  think  errs  by  belittling  and  in  a  way  belying  our  Lord's 
attitude  to  men  and  to  His  work.  We  have  seen  how 
He  always  spoke  of  the  Son  of  man  and  the  Son  of  God  as  if 
He  were,  so  to  say,  working  out  a  study,  a  theory,  an  ideal, 
of  what  this  personage,  whoever  He  individually  was,  should 
be  and  do.  It  was  as  if  He  were  here  on  earth  creating  out  of 
existing  material  an  authentic  type  of  manhood  for  the  world 
to  see  and  judge  and  accept.  This  type  He  was  shaping  every 
day,  not  by  words  and  philosophy  alone,  but  by  deeds  and  by 
the  way  He  met  experiences  as  they  came.  But  when  it  came 
to  applying  the  names  to  Himself,  or  making  high  assumptions, 
that  He  left  to  others;  His  sane  humility  would  not  let  Him 
claim  for  Himself  more  than  men  out  of  straight-seeing  eyes 
could  see.  So  when  men  asked  Him  to  declare  Himself,  He 
always  put  the  matter  back  upon  them;  as  if  He  would  have 
them  put  the  data  together  and  judge  for  themselves  whether 
He  answered  to  their  ideal  or  not.  When  John  the  Baptist, 
who  felt  that  the  truth  of  his  own  announcement  was  at  stake, 
sent  from  the  prison  the  inquiry  "Art  thou  he  that  should  come, 
or  look  we  for  another?"  the  answer  sent  back  to  him  was, 
"Go  and  tell  John  the  things  which  ye  do  hear  and  see,"  — 
as  if  Jesus  would  say,  There  are  the  data;  you  ought  to  know. 
Now  the  belittling  interpretation  of  which  I  spoke  relates  to 
the  answer  that,  as  we  note,  He  always  made  to  His  ques- 
tioners, high-priests  or  potentates,  whoever  would  fathom  His 
personality.  "Art  thou  the  Christ  — the  Son  of  God  — the 
King  of  the  Jews?"  "Thou  sayest,"  was  always  the  answer. 
Now  Professor  Schmidt  says  that  He  made  this  answer  as  an 
evasion,  because  He  knew  He  was  not  the  Messiah  and  was 
honest  enough  to  avoid  saying  He  was,  and  so  parried  the 


THE   SUPREME  HISTORIC   VENTURE      241 

question.  This,  it  seems  to  me,  introduces  a  false  note  into 
Jesus'  character;  if  it  makes  Him  honest  it  makes  Him  also 
cowardly.  Why,  I  think  that  answer  is  just  in  the  idiom  of 
His  whole  non-assuming  transparent  life:  "Thou  sayest"  is 
equivalent  to  answering,  "That  is  for  you  to  say."  This  com- 
ing of  the  Christ  He  regarded  as  a  sharing,  cooperative  matter, 
wherein  men  had  their  part  as  well  as  the  Christ.  If  it  was 
for  Him,  or  any  one,  to  be  the  Messiah,  it  was  for  them  to  see 
Him  as  He  was  and  name  Him,  according  to  the  answer  of 
their  hearts.  Else  He  was  no  Messiah  to  them;  nor  did  He 
desire  to  be,  on  any  other  terms  than  free  choice  and  recogni- 
tion. 

You  know  what  happens  as  soon  as  Peter  has  made  his  con- 
fession, showing  how  Jesus  has  come  to  impress  a  big-hearted,  ' 
genuine  man  of  the  people  who  has  companied  with  him  long. 
He  calls  that  confession,  and  the  spirit  that  can  make  it,  a  rock 
on  which  the  church  may  be  so  built  as  to  stand  against  the 
gates  of  hell.  Then  at  once  He  begins  to  ponder  on  that  great 
sacred  trust  of  His,  just  as  He  had  pondered  on  being  Son  of 
man  and  Son  of  God;  as  if  He  would  study  out  its  mighty  con- 
tent, and  learn  what  the  Christ  should  be  and  do.  The  Christ 
idea  had  become  so  hallowed  and  magnified  by  the  imagination 
of  the  ages  that,  like  all  great  historic  ideas,  it  had  acquired 
an  almost  superhuman  remoteness;  but  also  there  had  gathered 
round  it  unworthy  accretions  of  superstition  and  belittlement. 
And  now  that  it  had  come  close  home  to  Him,  to  His  own 
lowly  life,  the  first  thing  to  do  was  to  clear  up  the  idea,  making 
it  sane,  livable,  accessible.  It  was  as  if  a  world  burden  were 
laid  on  His  shoulders.  The  wholesomest  thought,  duty,  imagi- 
nation of  the  ages  and  the  lands  were  concentrated  in  Him, 
this  clear-seeing  artisan  of  Galilee.  He  had  been  chosen  for 
this  high  trust  for  the  spirit  that  was  without  measure  in  Him; 
the  working  of  it  out,  then,  must  be  as  it  were  an  obedience  to 
heredity,  the  consistent  way  which  His  whole  nature  had  al- 
ready started  upon.  Priests  and  Pharisees,  with  their  sneer 
of  devil's  work,  must  not  deflect  Him  one  inch;  He  was  on 
higher  ground  than  the  whims  and  blindness  of  a  generation 


242  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

or  a  national  form  of  religion.  The  hungering  heart  of  aliens 
and  heathen,  sharing  in  the  same  large  humanity,  was  calling 
Him;  He  must  not  disregard  this  universal  need  and  capacity 
for  a  common  faith.  The  Christ,  the  anointed  King  of  men, 
must  be  a  Christ  for  the  ages  and  for  the  world;  the  redeem- 
ing Head  of  the  whole  family  in  heaven  and  earth,  the  firstborn 
of  every  creature.  Such  must  have  been  the  nature  of  the 
ponderings  which  Peter's  confession  and  the  events  of  the 
latest  few  days  pressed  upon  Him.  He  was  confronting  the 
greatest  idea  in  the  world,  and  was  undertaking  to  incorporate 
it  in  His  own  life.  No  such  sacred  trust  had  ever  been  laid 
on  mortal  man  before;  no  more  godlike  opportunity  could  ever 
come  again.  It  must  not  therefore  be  entered  on  lightly  or 
hastily;  its  deepest  ultimate  meaning  must  be  studied  out  in 
secret,  and  preclude  the  risk  of  any  false  step.  No  wonder  He 
told  His  disciples  to  keep  quiet  about  so  tremendous  a  revela- 
tion, until  He  could  have  time  to  feel  and  know  His  way. 

But  as  soon  as  He  reached  this  table-land  of  Messianic  con- 
sciousness, one  element  of  the  idea  came  to  Him  at  once  as  an 
essential,  elemental  requisite.  The  Son  of  man,  the  anointed 
King  and  Type  of  manhood,  must  die.  Death  was  a  part  of 
His  kingliness;  it  stood  there  plain  and  obvious  in  the  path  to 
His  glory.  To  be  sure  there  was  the  death  that  all  must  die, 
the  common  lot  of  man;  but  in  this  new  case  the  death,  just 
because  it  was  the  common  lot,  must  be  other.  It  must  be  a 
death  freely  chosen,  the  more  freely  because  it  could  so  easily 
and  naturally  be  evaded.  And  so  it  must  be  a  death  for  men, 
a  death  that  came  as  the  uttermost  expression  of  love. 
"Greater  love  hath  no  man  than  this,  that  a  man  lay  down  his 
life  for  his  friends."  If,  as  hitherto,  He  was  committed  to  the 
complete  and  ultimate  revelation  of  the  love  of  the  Father,  He 
must  not  flinch  from  this.  In  a  world  where  sin  so  abounds, 
and  where  men's  eyes  are  so  blinded  by  it,  grace  must  much 
more  abound ;  it  must  prove  that  it  is  free  grace,  and  the  most 
godlike  pulsation  of  all  being,  by  abounding;  it  must  abound 
by  outlasting  the  deadliest  that  sin  can  do.  If  it  cannot  so 
outlast,  taking  sin's  most  venomous  onsets  yet  remaining  con- 


THE  SUPREME  HISTORIC  VENTURE      243 

stant  and  active,  then  there  comes  a  point  where  grace  goes 
under  and  sin  is  the  ruling  element  in  the  world.  This  must 
not  be;  God,  who  is  love,  must  not  have  created  and  led  for- 
ward His  handiwork  in  vain;  manhood,  whose  spirit  has  risen 
dimly  to  such  heights  of  capability,  must  not  fail  of  that  height 
which  is  the  crown  and  solution  of  all.  So  there  is  nothing  for 
it  but  that  the  Christ  shall  lay  down  His  life  for  the  world.  He 
must  do  it,  in  order  to  be  true  to  the  ideal  He  has  already  pur- 
sued as  Son  of  man;  not  to  do  it  is  to  go  back  upon  its 
sacredest  demands  and  own  the  evil  of  man's  heart  too  strong 
for  Him.  Now  you  can  see  how  little  of  that  "facility  or  soft- 
ness" which  Lord  Bacon  deprecates,  and  which  the  world  in 
its  false  pride  despises,  there  is  in  boundless  goodness  to  men. 
It  is  not  "bondage  to  men's  faces  or  fancies,"  but  the  polar 
opposite;  not  bondage  to  their  stormy  malice  and  blindness 
either,  but  the  heavenly  freedom  from  it;  it  is  the  strong  thrill 
of  the  eternal  life  smiting  into  time  and  putting  there  the  vi- 
tality which  overflows  and  outlasts.  You  can  see  now  too 
how  that  strain  of  grace  is  also  the  strain  of  truth;  it  is  true 
to  itself  and  integral  even  to  the  end;  meek  and  yielding  as  it 
seems,  it  abates  no  inch  of  its  principle;  it  has  the  power  and 
constancy  of  the  eternal  ongoings  of  the  universe. 

So  when  the  disciples  get  their  glimpse  of  His  essential  Mes- 
siahship,  the  next  thing  Jesus  does  is  to  take  them  and  sol- 
emnly tell  them  that  the  Son  of  man  must  be  delivered  into 
the  hands  of  men  and  die  at  their  hands  and  rise  into  the  fulness 
of  life  that  way.  This  is  estranging  to  them  and  inexplicable; 
it  contradicts  all  that  their  imagination  has  shaped  of  the 
Christ.  When  the  Christ  comes,  must  He  not  abide  for  ever, 
and  if  so,  must  He  not  be  the  grand  exception  to  nature  and  be 
gloriously  exempt  from  ignominy  and  death?  If  Enoch  could 
be  rapt  away  from  earth  without  dying;  if  Elijah  could  rise 
in  a  chariot  of  fire;  if  Moses  could  fall  asleep  by  "the  kiss  of 
the  Eternal";  if  these  could  be  historic  exceptions  to  the  mor- 
tal lot;  how  much  more  the  highest  and  holiest  of  all,  He  whom 
God  has  anointed  and  crowned  King  of  men.  No,  said  Peter, 
right  on  the  heels  of  his  great  confession;  no,  this  humiliation 


244  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

must  not,  cannot  be.  But  here  he  met  his  sharpest  rebuke. 
He  was  wrong,  he  was  blind,  to  say  so;  it  was,  though  he  knew 
it  not  and  though  it  was  the  impulse  of  loyalty,  it  was  the  Satan 
in  him  that  urged  the  self-aggrandizement  of  Messiah  and 
the  royal  exemption  from  death.  How  easy  it  thus  was,  in 
the  presence  of  this  ideal  of  outlasting  grace,  to  become  the 
tempter,  the  mouthpiece  of  the  Adversary  himself!  John  the 
Baptist  had  come,  and  rightly  received,  he  had  all  the  spirit 
and  power  of  the  promised  Elijah ;  but  men  did  with  him  what 
they  pleased,  and  they  pleased  to  put  him  to  death,  just  as 
they  had  served  the  other  prophets.  So  with  the  Son  of  man; 
they  will  do  with  Him  what  they  please;  but  at  all  events  He 
must  be  to  the  uttermost  the  subject  and  target  of  their  free 
will,  and  their  salvation  must  hang  on  what  they  please  to  do, 
on  the  spontaneous  choice  they  make,  not  on  what  they  are 
forced  to  do.  At  all  hazards  the  human  spirit  must  have  free 
play,  whether  in  hatred  or  in  love;  in  no  other  way  can  the 
freedom  which  is  love  have  its  supreme  opportunity  in  their 
hearts.  But  so  also  must  the  Son  of  man  assert  His  freedom : 
just  by  being  true  to  Himself,  true  to  the  extreme  of  laying 
down  the  life  that  their  blind  hatred  demands.  Nor  only  so. 
If  you,  He  says,  my  disciples,  are  going  to  follow  after  me, 
learning  my  way  and  sharing  in  my  kingliness,  you  must  every 
one  of  you  deny  yourselves,  and  take  up  your  cross  daily,  and 
trudge  forward  patiently,  stedfastly,  strongly,  in  the  way  of 
that  same  death  to  sin.  This  is  not  the  way  for  one  anointed, 
glorified  man  alone;  not  a  performance  for  your  magnified 
Ideal  to  go  through  and  leave  you  down  below  gaping  in 
wonder;  it  is  the  godlike  way  of  every  man.  Death  too,  for 
me  and  every  man,  must  be  no  longer  a  bondage  but  a  free- 
dom; you  must  learn  to  use  it  for  all  there  is  in  it,  by  living 
the  life  that  rises  above  it.  For  your  goal  is  not  to  evade 
death,  or  even  to  get  ready  for  death;  your  goal,  no  less  than 
mine,  is  resurrection,  the  uprise  of  life  on  which  death,  though 
it  come  as  the  extreme  of  injustice  and  cruelty,  has  no  power. 
We  come  here  in  sight  of  a  new  truth,  a  truth  of  untold  sig- 
nificance for  every  man.  In  His  wise  way  of  bringing  things 


THE  SUPREME  HISTORIC  VENTURE      245 

into  sound  balance  and  relation,  you  remember  how  Jesus  made 
it  clear  that  law,  that  universal  empire  in  which  all  nature 
is,  is  for  the  completed  man  merely  an  incident  of  life.  Here 
now  we  behold  a  truth  greater  yet:  that  for  the  Messiah,  and 
so  ideally  for  every  son  of  man,  death  is  an  incident  of  life. 
Amazing  as  it  seems  at  first  to  us  who  see  it  taking  away  every 
dear  one  we  have  and  waiting  inexorably  for  us,  this  is  the 
calm  assurance  on  which  He  enters  His  high  mission.  Death 
is  not  extinction  of  life,  not  deflection  from  the  life's  currents, 
not  stoppage  and  delay  of  vitality;  not  what  to  the  eyes  it 
seems  to  be  at  all.  It  is  merely  a  station  on  the  way  to  uprise 
and  resurrection.  Therefore  it  is  not  a  motive  of  life;  as  if 
our  business  were  to  prepare  for  it,  or  in  any  way  to  change 
our  attitude  of  life,  in  conformity  to  a  thing  that  comes  without 
preparation,  and  has  no  moral  worth  when  it  comes.  There  is 
nothing  in  it  to  make  a  motive  out  of.  The  life  remains  in- 
tact, with  all  its  endowments  of  loyalty,  righteousness,  grace, 
truth;  steps  down  to  the  tomb  with  all  these  vital  motions 
strong  as  ever  within  it.  At  the  same  time  Jesus  hallows  death 
into  a  life  element,  makes  it  from  an  inert  characterless  thing 
into  a  vital  motive,  by  accepting  it  as  death  for  the  world  and 
for  truth,  swinging  it  thus  into  the  consistent  line  of  love.  It 
is  an  incident  of  life;  but  being  the  last  enemy  to  be  destroyed, 
it  may  be  made  the  redeeming,  crowning,  holiest  incident.  And 
His  death,  with  its  world  accompaniments,  shall  exhibit  death 
to  all  the  ages  in  its  ultimate  type  and  beauty. 

What  then  does  this  crisis  in  Jesus'  ministry,  when  as  Christ 
He  confronted  the  eternal  issues  of  life  and  death,  demand? 
Simply  that  He  go  on  being  true  to  Himself  and  to  life  as  He 
sees  it.  He  is  here,  a  man  among  men;  working  out  the  details 
of  manhood  life;  He  will  not  therefore  take  advantage  of  His 
Messiahship,  as  Peter  urged,  to  introduce  an  exception  into 
the  order  of  things,  or  any  miracle  except  such  as  by  faith  all 
could  work.  He  will  not  assume  the  god,  just  because  He  is 
Messiah;  rather  He  will  be  the  more  truly  a  man.  The  Mes- 
siahship has  not  changed  His  nature;  rather  it  has  given  His 
Son-of-manship  free  course.  This  must  express  itself  to  the 


246  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

end,  or  rather,  regardless  of  the  end.  It  must  use  death  as 
it  will,  putting  it  into  its  true  subordinate  place;  and  thus,  by 
a  supreme  object  lesson,  deliver  those,  the  shivering,  paralyzed 
humanity,  who  through  fear  of  death  have  been  all  their  life- 
time subject  to  bondage.  For  the  Son  of  man  has  it  in  Him 
to  conquer  that  last  enemy,  by  making  it  an  authentic  element 
of  life. 

From  this  time,  then,  the  record  goes  on  to  say,  Jesus  set 
His  face  stedfastly  to  go  to  Jerusalem,  where  He  knew  death 
awaited  Him.  There  was  a  Messianic  dignity  and  sublimity 
in  this  very  resolve,  which  showed  itself  in  His  whole  appear- 
ance and  mien.  It  seemed  to  make  Him  larger  than  human. 
The  disciples,  you  remember,  were  amazed  as  they  saw  Him 
going  on  before  them;  and  like  men  dazed  they  followed,  not 
knowing  what  it  all  meant.  So  in  course  of  time  He  came  to 
the  capital  city;  and  it  happened  to  Him  as  He  had  foretold. 
Calmly  and  wisely  He  made  His  preparations,  preparing  His 
disciples  for  the  event  and  for  what  should  follow;  putting  into 
their  minds  strange  words  and  predictions,  which  some  time, 
when  the  stress  and  the  need  came  upon  them,  they  would  re- 
member. Then  He  was  set  before  the  high-priest  and  ques- 
tioned on  oath,  Art  thou  the  Messiah?  "Thou  sayest,"  was 
His  answer;  that  is  for  thee  to  say.  But  how  do  you  prove  it? 
There  are  my  works  and  my  words,  open  and  plain;  in  secret 
have  I  said  nothing.  But  He  added  a  significant  thing.  This 
life  of  mine,  it  meant,  is  just  the  way  of  highest  manhood,  and 
whether  you  accept  me  or  not,  hereafter  you  shall  see  the  Son 
of  man,  the  divinely  perfected  manhood,  coming  in  the  clouds 
of  heaven.  That  is  the  far  end  for  which  He  is  living,  what- 
ever the  event  to  Him  individually.  Then  later  He  is  brought 
before  Pilate,  the  highest  representative  of  kingly  might  and 
authority.  Here  is  one  of  the  sublime  moments  of  history; 
a  greater  scene  than  Joan  of  Arc  before  her  accusers,  or  Luther 
at  Worms:  the  king  of  the  land,  with  the  handling  of  brute 
life  and  death  in  his  hands,  and  the  King  of  men,  with  the  gift 
of  eternal  life  before  which  death  becomes  a  paltry  powerless 
thing.  "Art  thou  the  king  of  the  Jews?"  Pilate  first  asks;  but 


THE  SUPREME  HISTORIC  VENTURE      247 

Jesus  puts  the  question  aside  as  not  relevant  to  Pilate  himself; 
it  makes  no  difference  to  Pilate  whether  Jesus  is  king  of  the 
Jews  or  not;  that  is  a  question  for  the  Jews  to  determine. 
"Art  thou  a  king  then?"  Pilate  goes  on,  in  vaguely  prescient 
apprehension,  to  ask.  And  the  answer  seems  to  me  one  of  the 
most  wonderful  answers  in  all  history.  "Thou  sayest  that  I 
am  a  king";  it  is  for  thee  to  say  whether  I  am  a  king,  to  say 
according  to  what  your  heart  tells  you.  The  appeal  is  to  the 
heart  of  a  Roman  potentate,  the  representative  of  a  mighty 
world-power  whose  genius  is  for  law,  organization,  order,  jus- 
tice; such  a  representative  ought  to  know.  Then  He  goes  on 
to  give  the  data:  telling  this  king  of  the  earth,  for  him  to 
weigh  and  judge,  what  it  is  to  be  a  king.  "To  this  end  was 
I  born,  and  for  this  cause  came  I  into  the  world,  that  I  should 
bear  witness  to  the  truth.  Every  one  that  is  of  the  truth 
heareth  my  voice."  A  marvelous  way  this  to  be  a  king:  just 
to  be  a  true  man,  according  to  the  ideal  of  manhood  that  birth, 
and  the  wise  ages  of  prophecy,  and  the  free  movement  of  the 
spirit  have  put  within  Him.  Such  true  manhood  as  this  men 
will  hear  and  obey,  and  thus  make  it  their  king,  as  soon  as  they 
will  let  the  manhood  that  is  in  them  speak  and  the  true  cur- 
rents of  being  have  free  course.  But  the  definition  is  too 
simple  for  Pilate.  He  has  always  been  so  tangled  up  with  ex- 
pediencies and  opportunism,  with  schemes  for  keeping  his  po- 
sition intact  and  keeping  his  head  on  his  shoulders,  with 
politics  and  complicated  policies,  —  in  a  word,  with  what  we 
in  modern  days  call  the  policy  of  "get  there,"  of  securing  im- 
mediate ends,  no  matter  what,  by  hook  or  crook,  —  that  all 
conception  of  a  determining  truth  and  principle  of  being,  of  a 
character  moving  consistently  and  all  together  and  to  an  ideal 
end,  is  atrophied  and  lost.  "What  is  truth?"  he  asks,  in  utter 
bewilderment;  and  turns  away;  and  belies  the  timidly  rising 
nobility  of  his  nature  by  yielding  once  more  to  the  tyrannous 
necessity  of  keeping  his  head  on  his  shoulders,  and  weakly  let- 
ting the  clamorous  Jews  have  all  their  will,  and  by  trying  to 
wash  his  hands  of  the  whole  matter.  So  that  interview  of  the 
two  kings  resolves  itself  into  the  truth  of  life  and  falsity  and 


248  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

weakness  of  life  confronting  each  other.  We  see  where  the 
real  strength  remains,  and  when  it  comes  to  the  encounter, 
which  goes  under.  We  see  too  that  the  power  put  momen- 
tarily into  the  false  one's  hands  to  crucify  the  True  has  nothing 
to  do  with  the  issue,  except  to  make  that  Malefactor's  death 
for  ever  glorious. 

How  we  have  suffered  ourselves  to  belittle  our  idea  of  truth! 
How  far  we  have  fallen  short  of  seeing  the  sublimity  of  this 
simplest  thing  in  life,  being  true  to  self  and  ideal!  We  too, 
like  Pilate,  have  become  tangled  up  in  our  expediencies,  and 
our  temporary  makeshifts,  and  our  worldly  machinery,  and 
our  too  convenient  assumption  that  it  is  the  business  of  human 
nature  to  be  more  or  less  sinful  and  fallen;  until  the  straight 
road  of  life  has  become  blurred  and  befogged,  and  our  paths 
have  become  crooked.  Truth  is  not  a  thing  to  tell;  it  is  a 
thing  to  be.  "I  am  the  truth,"  was  our  Lord's  word  to  His 
disciples;  and  when  He  says  to  Pilate  He  has  come  into  the 
world  to  bear  witness  to  the  truth,  do  you  know  what  the  word 
"bear  witness"  means?  It  is  the  same  word  from  which  comes 
our  word  martyr.  I  am  come  to  be  martyr  to  the  truth;  that 
is  what  He  says;  to  hold  and  live  the  truth  of  life  in  face  of 
all  that  comes,  be  it  policy  or  persecution  or  rejection  or  death; 
to  hold  up  the  truth  of  essential  manhood  high  for  all  men  to 
know.  And  in  an  age  which  had  forgotten  what  truth  was, 
and  would  not  lift  a  finger  for  anything  but  its  own  selfish  in- 
terests, He  put  a  strain  into  the  hearts  of  lowly  men,  fishermen 
and  mechanics  and  the  weak  of  the  earth,  which  impelled  them 
to  walk  joyfully  to  the  stake  and  die  for  what  was  in  them, 
martyrs  to  the  same  noble  witnessing  to  truth.  And  He  re- 
vealed that  this  is  a  divine  thing;  for  a  little  later,  when  the 
meaning  of  things  has  time  to  shape  itself,  we  hear  St.  Paul 
saying  that  the  Holy  Spirit  witnesses  with  ours,  is  a  martyr 
along  with  us,  as  we  work  out  the  wondrous  determination  to 
be  true.  It  has  become  the  glad  freedom  of  life,  according  to 
the  word  which  He  said,  "Ye  shall  know  the  truth,  and  the 
truth  shall  make  you  free." 

We  have  seen  Him  resolving  on  death,  and  setting  His  face 


THE  SUPREME  HISTORIC   VENTURE      249 

stedfastly  to  go  to  Jerusalem.  All  this  had  a  great  philosophy 
of  noblest  life  underlying  it,  a  philosophy  which,  according  to 
His  wont,  He  drew  from  the  analogies  of  God's  great  world  of 
nature.  When  the  Greeks,  you  remember,  came  to  ask  Him 
about  His  principle,  He  hailed  the  moment  as  the  moment  of 
His  glorification,  and  gave  them  this  explanation:  "Except  a 
corn  of  wheat  fall  into  the  ground  and  die,  it  abide th  alone; 
but  if  it  die,  it  beareth  much  fruit."  The  same  truth  this,  that 
St.  Paul  afterward  takes  up  and  restates,  almost  in  scorn  for 
those  who  will  not  see  a  thing  so  clear:  "Thou  fool,  that  which 
thou  sowest  is  not  quickened  except  it  die."  What  a  different 
face  this  puts  upon  death,  just  because  it  utilizes  death  in  the 
way  of  being  stedfast,  and  strong,  and  true.  Such  death,  or 
rather  such  oneness  of  purpose  and  consistency  to  holiest  man- 
hood, opens  the  Christ  way  for  every  lowliest,  weakest  one. 
He  first  trod  the  wine-press  alone;  was  the  pioneer  to  open 
the  strange  new  way  of  life  and  truth,  He  who  was  the  way 
and  the  truth  and  the  life;  but  thenceforward  the  gate  stood 
open  for  every  one  to  enter.  And  as  for  Him,  who  first  made 
this  witnessing  for  truth  the  great  object-lesson  of  martyrdom : 
"And  I,"  He  said,  "if  I  be  lifted  up  from  the  earth,  will  draw 
all  men  unto  me."  That  is  the  crown  of  His  kingliness:  is 
there  any  other  real  test  of  kingliness  adequate  except  this, 
that  men  come  eagerly  to  be  subject,  to  be  loyal  and  free  in 
His  presence,  because  there  is  their  one  blessedness?  How  dif- 
ferent from  the  dominion  that  Satan  promised  Him  on  the  ex- 
ceeding high  mountain!  It  is  the  kingliness  in  which,  by  our 
response  to  the  same  spirit,  we  all  become  kings  in  our  degree; 
all  living  the  same  strain  of  life,  all  bound  for  the  like  ending 
of  it.  So  a  little  later  we  hear  the  same  note  of  truth  addressed 
as  a  hope  and  promise  to  every  one:  "Be  thou  faithful  unto 
death,  and  I  will  give  thee  the  crown  of  life." 

IV.      THE     DECEASE     ACCOMPLISHED     AT     JERUSALEM 

We  have  seen  the  end  which  Jesus  set  before  Him  from  His 
baptism :  to  be  faithful  to  His  ideal  jof  Son  of  God  by  being 


250  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

consistently  Son  of  man,  and  therefore  the  Brother  of  every 
human  soul.  We  have  seen  how  His  thoughts  were  enlarged 
as  the  sense  of  His  Messiahship  came  in  full  force  upon  Him; 
and  how  the  enlargement  was  after  all  but  the  intensification 
of  life  in  the  same  predetermined  direction :  faithfulness  to  the 
lowly  occasion,  and  duty  becoming  faithfulness,  bearing  full 
weight  of  witness,  martyrdom,  to  the  full  truth  of  manhood. 
There  is  no  alteration  of  principle  here;  only  an  enlargement 
of  scale:  bearing  witness  to  the  truth  is  just  faithfulness  car- 
ried to  its  larger  ultimate.  If  it  is  required  of  a  steward  that 
he  be  found  faithful,  of  a  king  likewise,  who  is  the  steward  of 
a  loftier  trust,  it  is  required  that  He  be  true  to  the  kingly  ideal 
that  is  laid  upon  Him.  And  in  Christ's  case  the  idea  reaches 
the  height  of  grandeur  from  the  fact,  in  which  He  and  the 
Father  were  consciously  at  one,  that  the  lot  of  the  eternities 
had  fallen  on  Him  to  be  the  Anointed  One,  the  firstborn  of 
many  brethren,  the  King  of  kings.  And  we  have  seen  how, 
"being  found  in  fashion  as  a  man,"  with  the  noble  humility  of 
manhood  upon  Him,  He  at  once  recognized  that  the  logic  of 
His  situation  required  Him  to  be  "obedient  unto  death,  even 
the  death  of  the  cross." 

We  have  now  to  inquire  how  this  end,  which  to  Him  was 
merely  bearing  witness  to  the  truth,  actually  came  to  Him. 
Our  inquiry  will  reveal  some  marvelous  things,  of  which  I  can 
only  say,  you  must  not  take  them  on  my  say-so,  and  it  is  for 
you  to  determine  whether  you  will  take  them  at  all.  My  busi- 
ness is  merely  to  tell  you  what  the  Bible  says ;  and  if  the  Bible, 
which  with  all  its  wonders  of  record  speaks  throughout  in  the 
tone  of  perfect  sanity  and  soberness,  —  if  the  Bible  account 
is  not  true,  well,  we  are  left  with  life  infinitely  poorer  and 
leaner,  and  we  are  yet  in  our  sins.  Hitherto  it  has  lifted  us 
step  by  step  to  heights  of  vision  and  an  awesome  rarity  and 
purity  of  atmosphere;  let  us  trust  its  pinion  a  little  farther, 
and  tell  out  the  tale  to  the  ending. 

There  is  a  thing  much  spoken  of  in  literature,  and  held  as 
an  absolute  requisite  to  the  art:  the  thing  that  men  call  "po- 
etic justice."  The  poet,  you  know,  was  figured  by  the  Greeks, 


THE  SUPREME  HISTORIC  VENTURE      251 

who  are  our  arbiters  in  art,  as  a  maker,  a  creator;  that  is  what 
our  term  poet  originally  means:  a  creator  of  new  ideals,  new 
worlds  of  thought  and  imagery,  new  ranges  of  spiritual  exist- 
ence. And  it  was  required  of  these  new  creations  that  they 
be  organic  and  self-consistent,  and  that  when  the  end  comes  it 
shall  come  out  right,  with  the  potency  and  promise  of  its  whole 
structure  fulfilled.  Otherwise  its  creative  justice  fails;  it  has 
not  obeyed  its  law  of  being.  As  soon  as  we  apply  this  principle 
to  the  literature  of  the  Bible,  we  have  brought  this  too  into 
the  court  of  poetic  justice.  Does  this  too  come  out  right?  I  am 
not  asking  now  whether  it  accords  with  that  truth  absolute  to 
which  we  may  commit  our  lives  and  destiny;  that  is  a  thing 
for  our  personal  faith  to  settle;  but  whether  it  comes  out  con- 
sistently with  its  beginning  and  its  whole  creative  course.  One 
thing  we  have  noted  about  the  life  of  Jesus:  He  has  lived 
throughout  as  if  He  were  a  poet,  creating  a  new  world  of  ideal, 
putting  into  concrete  expression  the  terms  Son  of  God,  Son  of 
man,  King  of  men,  Messiah,  the  loftiest  terms  that  can  engage 
the  poetic  mind;  creating  this  new  world  not  in  words  alone, 
or  philosophy,  or  beautiful  imagery,  but  in  the  far  more  cogent 
eloquence  of  perfect  deeds.  In  these,  in  bearing  witness  there- 
by to  the  truth  as  He  saw  it,  His  life  has  been  absolutely  of 
a  piece.  His  committal  to  it  has  been  the  committal  of  utter- 
most faith.  What  now  does  the  report  tell  us  of  the  poetic 
justice  of  the  case?  How  do  things  fit  together,  and  how  do 
they  fit  the  larger  meaning  which  we  now  know  was  the  sequel 
to  them?  This,  you  see,  is  not  the  question  how  some  deed 
of  His  would  have  looked  at  the  time,  to  a  company  of  be- 
wildered disciples  who  had  no  key  to  its  purport  or  motive; 
but  rather  how  it  came  to  look  when  they  saw  how  it  came 
out,  and  when  the  spirit,  their  guide  to  truth,  was  taking  the 
things  of  Christ  and  showing  to  them.  Therein  lies  the  key 
to  this  grand  organism  of  poetic  justice;  it  is  quite  analogous 
to  the  true  reading  of  all  inner  history.  There  is  poetry,  spiri- 
tual creativeness,  as  well  as  fact,  in  every  great  movement  of 
life  and  mind;  much  more  then,  it  would  seem,  in  the  greatest 
movement  of  all.  Goethe,  when  he  wrote  his  autobiography, 


252  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

called  it  "Dichtung  und  Wahrheit"  poetry  and  truth;  and 
many  readers  since  his  time,  hide-bound  in  external  fact,  have 
accused  him  of  taking  liberties  with  reality  and  recording 
things  merely  fantastic  and  imaginative.  Not  so :  that  is  what 
his  life  meant,  to  him;  it  took  more  than  deeds  alone  to  com- 
pass it;  there  was  also,  in  the  motive  and  meaning  of  the  deeds, 
and  in  the  ideals  he  had  at  heart,  a  claim  of  poetic  justice. 
Just  so,  in  its  purer  and  loftier  degree,  in  the  life  of  Jesus: 
that  too  was  truly  a  poem,  which  if  true  to  highest  manhood, 
must  be  as  it  were  a  work  of  divine  art,  and  come  out  accord- 
ing to  the  claims  of  poetic  justice. 

On  our  way,  then,  to  the  marvelous  outcome  of  His  life,  let 
us  pick  up  some  of  the  connecting  links  and  indications,  and 
see  how  they  fit  together. 

We  saw  how  a  little  past  the  middle  of  His  ministry  there 
seemed  to  have  come  to  the  carpenter-prophet  a  great  enlarge- 
ment of  range  and  scope;  how  He  felt  that  the  scale  of  His 
life  and  being  was  greatened;  and  how  this  was  intimately 
connected,  as  would  appear,  with  His  consciousness  of  Mes- 
siahship.  This  enlargement  of  range  we  might  describe  to  our 
metaphysician  friends,  who  surely  ought  to  have  due  deference 
paid  to  their  idiom,  as  an  expansion  of  being  in  two  directions : 
the  direction  of  space  and  the  direction  of  time.  In  other 
words,  it  was  as  if  He  had  come  to  see  that  in  order  to  be 
truly  Messianic  the  life  and  light  that  were  in  Him  must  be 
universal,  fitted  not  to  Jew  alone,  nor  any  mere  ethnic  condi- 
tion, but  to  Greek  and  heathen,  to  man  as  man,  to  the  spirit 
that  was  dimly  stirring  in  every  remotest  human  life.  This 
in  the  space  direction.  Then  as  to  the  time  direction:  the 
Messiah  had  from  earliest  times  existed  in  the  prophetic  soul 
of  the  world,  and  He  must,  when  arrived  in  flesh,  be  the  same 
yesterday  and  to-day  and  for  ever.  As  Anointed  One  of  the 
ages  He  must,  so  to  say,  embody  a  power  which  should  be  at 
once  active,  pro-active,  and  retroactive,  the  divine  power  of  the 
eternities,  made  visible  and  operative  in  human  personality. 
No  less  tremendous  ideal  than  this  could  fulfil  the  promise  and 
satisfy  the  colossal  poetic  thought  that  had  so  long  been  strug- 


THE  SUPREME  HISTORIC   VENTURE      253 

gling  toward  expression  in  the  mind  of  the  centuries.  Does 
now  the  record  of  His  life,  from  this  enlargement  onward, 
shape  itself  in  some  authentic  degree  to  such  poetic  justice 
as  this?  If  so,  what  gleams  and  flashes  of  this  greater  rela- 
tion of  things  shall  we  find  in  One  who,  even  while  He  is  aware 
of  His  majestic  position,  will  not  consent  for  one  moment  to 
cease  being  the  approachable  comrade  and  brother  of  every 
humblest  man?  This  is  the  situation  of  things  that  we  are 
now  confronting. 

Well,  from  the  beginning  of  His  ministry,  we  have  noted 
a  steady  movement  toward  the  first  of  these,  toward  univer- 
sality of  work  and  love  and  sympathy.  In  meeting  His  dead- 
liest temptation,  He  would  commit  Himself  to  nothing  which 
should  interpose  the  slightest  bar  to  this.  His  interpretation 
of  the  law  transcended  every  thing  merely  Jewish  or  ceremonial 
or  conventional,  and  brought  the  spirit  of  the  law  home  to  the 
universal  heart.  Then  as  He  went  on,  He  whose  very  ideal  of 
law  had  made  the  family  so  pure  and  sacred  a  centre  of  rela- 
tions, He  outgrew  the  bounds  of  family;  saying  to  His  mother, 
"Woman,  what  have  I  to  do  with  thee?"  and  when  she  with 
His  brothers  would  confine  Him  to  the  tether  of  an  earthly 
family,  saying  to  all  His  hearers,  "Who  is  my  mother?  and 
who  are  my  brethren?"  Then  stretching  forth  His  hand 
toward  His  disciples,  He  said,  "Behold  my  mother  and  my 
brethren !  For  whosoever  shall  do  the  will  of  my  Father  which 
is  in  heaven,  the  same  is  my  brother,  and  sister  and  mother." 
A  harsh  answer  this  has  seemed  to  some,  but  only  to  those  who 
would  make  their  love  an  enclosure,  in  which  regard  for  the 
little  clique  inside  might  be  a  motive  for  enmity  or  indifference 
to  all  others.  Such  exclusive  love,  as  between  man  and  wife, 
has  been  thus  described  in  a  most  popular  recent  novel: 
"Yes,"  it  is  said  of  Simon  Rosedale,  "he  would  be  kind  .  .  . 
kind  in  his  gross,  unscrupulous,  rapacious  way,  the  way  of  a 
predatory  creature  with  his  mate."  The  Jewish  feeling,  you 
see,  the  law  of  the  species  sharpened  to  a  point.  The  soul  of 
Jesus,  King  of  the  Jews  though  He  truly  was,  could  not  cramp 
itself  to  anything  like  this.  For  His  love  to  man,  patterned  on 


254  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

the  love  of  God,  was  love  absolute;  so  that  if  He  loved  His 
family,  as  He  probably  did  and  provided  for  them  by  His  ac- 
tual labor  till  His  thirtieth  year,  that  fact  only  made  Him  love 
everybody  else  the  better,  according  to  the  relation  He  could 
establish  with  men.  Love,  with  Him,  was  not  a  family  or 
parish  or  provincial  matter;  it  took  account  of  no  such  bounds, 
but  only  of  its  own  intrinsic  motion,  as  free  as  the  kindly  offices 
of  air  and  rain  and  sunshine,  and  as  undiscriminating.  So  it 
went  on;  His  consistency  to  this  ideal  always  in  control;  so 
that  when  in  His  Messianic  consciousness  He  spoke  to  the 
Sadducees,  who  deny  resurrection,  and  described  the  resurrec- 
tion to  which  He  and  all  His  were  bound,  we  do  not  wonder 
that  He  corrected  their  materialistic  cavils  by  saying,  "Ye  do 
err,  not  knowing  the  scriptures,  nor  the  power  of  God.  For 
in  the  resurrection  they  neither  marry,  nor  are  given  in 
marriage,  but  are  as  the  angels  of  God  in  heaven."  The  up- 
rise to  which  His  life  was  directed  was  not  an  affair  of  the 
perpetuating  of  sexual  and  domestic  matings ;  there  was  enough 
in  earthly  ideals  of  love  already  to  hallow  these,  if  vitalized  by 
the  spirit;  it  was  rather  an  uprise  into  the  love  that  binds  the 
universe  of  hearts  together.  And  when,  on  that  last  sacred 
evening,  He  gives  His  little  circle  of  disciples  His  parting 
words,  it  is  of  a  piece  with  all  the  rest  of  His  life  that  He  says, 
"In  my  Father's  house  are  many  mansions;  if  it  were  not  so 
I  would  have  told  you;  .  .  .  and  other  sheep  I  have,  which 
are  not  of  this  fold."  He  has  become  consciously  the  Head  of 
the  whole  family  in  heaven  and  earth;  and  all  their  interests 
are  dear  to  Him.  Such  has  become  His  felt  relation  to  the 
great  spacious  world,  spreading  out  from  where  He  stands  and 
suffers  and  dies  to  the  remotest  corners;  spreading  out  from 
the  central  luminary  to  the  confines  of  darkness.  Wherever 
the  spirit  of  Christ  is,  there  is  the  centre  of  things,  and  there 
the  sheep  of  His  pasture  may  be  folded.  It  is  not  in  the  bounds 
of  space,  or  nation,  or  family,  or  species,  to  interpose  barriers 
to  the  limitless  love  of  God,  manifest  in  the  flesh,  His  incar- 
nate Word  to  men. 

But  just  as  He  came,  in  His  sense  of  Messiahship,  to  move 


THE  SUPREME  HISTORIC  VENTURE      255 

consciously  in  the  brotherhood  of  all  the  earth,  so  also  He 
entered  consciously  into  the  brotherhood  of  all  the  ages;  and 
here  we  aproach  a  strain  of  His  life  which  as  yet  we  can  but 
dimly  understand,  nor  can  we  understand  it  at  all  except  as 
we  know  within  ourselves  the  power  of  His  resurrection.  We 
can  only  note  the  strange  indications,  as  did  the  bewildered 
disciples ;  can  note  too,  as  we  put  data  and  data  together,  that 
all  belong  to  a  marvelous  tissue  of  poetic  justice.  If  a  new 
life  is  to  be  constructed  on  His  plan,  and  if  it  is  the  summit 
and  crown  of  manhood  life,  we  can  truly  say  these  wonders 
are  strictly  homogeneous  with  it;  though  they  seem  in  calm 
sober  sequence  to  have  thrown  down  the  barriers  of  death, 
and  to  have  introduced  man  into  the  felt  company  of  those  who 
have  gone  before,  as  if  they  were  present  all  the  while,  waiting 
only  till  we  have  eyes  to  see  and  life  to  appropriate.  That  pul- 
sation of  the  world  love  engenders  its  own  consciousness  of 
company  and  fellowship;  and  as  it  enlarges  no  past  is  past, 
but  all  its  wealth  of  life  is  a  perpetual  present,  as  real  as  is  the 
actual  presence  of  our  brothers  on  the  other  side  of  the  world. 
This,  I  say,  is  hard  to  understand;  for  here  in  the  flesh  our 
eyes  are  still  holden;  but  something  like  this  is  involved  in 
Jesus7  life  from  the  Messianic  recognition  onward;  He  lives 
and  acts  and  talks  as  if  this  were  so. 

About  a  week  after  He  had  so  solemnly  impressed  upon  His 
disciples  His  mission  of  death  and  rising  again  and  theirs  of 
self-denial  and  cross-bearing,  there  came  a  wonderful  mani- 
festation of  the  new  order  of  life  and  relationship  in  which  He 
was  moving.  It  came  to  only  three  of  the  disciples,  the  three 
who,  it  would  seem,  stood  nearest  to  the  divine  secret  of  His 
heart.  He  took  them  up  into  a  mountain,  and  there  He  was 
transfigured  —  metamorphosed,  the  original  word  is  —  before 
them;  and  again  in  His  history,  as  He  stood  there  shining  and 
glorious,  with  the  luminous  cloud  above  Him,  were  heard  the 
words,  "This  is  my  beloved  Son,  in  whom  I  am  well  pleased; 
hear  him."  Then  the  doors  of  the  mighty  past  seemed  all  at 
once  to  stand  wide  open,  and  the  eternal  unseen  was  disclosed 
to  mortal  view,  and  Moses  and  Elijah  were  there,  talking  over 


2.56  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

the  great  things  of  life  and  death  with  Jesus,  as  if  already  He 
were  of  their  company  and  in  His  own  fitting  home.  They 
spake,  St.  Luke  says,  of  His  decease  which  He  should  accom- 
plish at  Jerusalem;  the  thing  which  He  had  already  told  the 
disciples  must  needs  be:  His  exodus,  the  word  is,  His  going  out. 
Noteworthy,  is  it  not,  that  they  did  not  speak  of  death;  they 
gave  this  event  another  name,  a  new  name  perhaps,  coined 
for  the  new  thing.  It  was  the  same  tremendous  subject  of  dis- 
cussion which  one  of  these  disciples,  Peter,  afterward  said  had 
been  the  carefully  studied  theme  of  the  ancient  prophets,  the 
crux  of  their  prophecy;  "searching  what,  or  what  manner  of 
time  the  Spirit  of  Christ  which  was  in  them  did  signify,  when 
it  testified  beforehand  the  sufferings  of  Christ,  and  the  glory 
that  should  follow."  No  new  theme  this;  it  had  been  vital  and 
paramount  in  the  unseen  places  for  centuries;  and  immortal 
beings  were  waiting  in  wondering  suspense  for  the  solution,  on 
the  eve  of  which  the  world  seen  and  unseen  was  now  standing. 
Here,  among  the  immortals,  was  the  very  Spirit  who  had  given 
them  insight  and  foresight,  speaking  of  the  very  event  which 
so  long  ago  had  engaged  their  most  amazed  study.  It  was 
like  a  council  of  the  holiest  minds  of  the  ages,  planning  for 
the  crowning  glory  of  the  fully  evolved  manhood;  as  it  were  a 
kind  of  rehearsal  and  understudy  of  the  supreme  uprise,  now 
so  near  at  hand.  That  it  meant  something  like  this  would 
seem  to  have  been  Jesus'  explanation  of  it;  for  you  know  He 
told  the  disciples  to  say  nothing  about  it  until  the  Son  of  man 
had  risen  from  the  dead,  that  they  might  have  that  event  to 
interpret  it  by. 

The  Transfiguration  has  all  the  elements  of  a  clarifying,  and 
surely  much  needed  object-lesson.  It  seems  to  reveal  the  true 
situation  and  relation  of  things  on  the  Christ  scale:  life  and 
death,  survival,  immortality,  resurrection,  all  seem  here  to  fall 
into  place  and  coordination  as  in  no  other  event  of  Scripture. 
Of  course  there  is  an  easy  way  to  dispose  of  the  whole  matter, 
Professor  Schmidt's  way:  to  say  that  it  never  occurred,  that 
it  is  a  fancy  picture.  That  kind  of  denial  must  have  been 
urged  long  ago;  for  Peter  takes  pains  afterward  to  say  of  this 


THE  SUPREME  HISTORIC   VENTURE      257 

very  event  that  it  was  actual  fact,  and  that  we  have  not  fol- 
lowed cunningly  devised  fables.  But  this  consideration  apart, 
there  is  still  the  congruity  and  harmony,  the  poetic  justice  of 
the  case,  to  be  reckoned  with;  for  as  soon  as  we  lift  ourselves 
from  material  facts  to  that  higher  order  and  scale  of  events 
in  which  the  whole  life  of  Jesus  and  the  whole  history  of  man- 
hood evolution  moves,  this  fits  in  perfectly  as  a  natural  and 
vital  ingredient.  It  is  as  if  for  once  we  were  reading  the 
highest  and  deepest  things  of  life  from  the  inside,  where  we  see 
at  first  hand  the  powers  and  motives  that  give  it  meaning.  Let 
us  see  how  this  is. 

I  well  remember  the  feeling  that  came  upon  me  when  in  one 
of  the  Passion  Play  years  I  entered  the  little  village  of  Oberam- 
mergau.  As  I  walked  through  the  street,  with  its  neat 
white-washed  cottages,  each  with  a  picture  of  some  scripture 
scene  painted  on  its  front,  then  saw  the  dominating  parish 
church  in  one  direction,  and  in  the  other,  at  the  edge  of  the 
hamlet,  the  more  dominating  open-air  theatre  where  the  Pas- 
sion Play  was  given,  and  behind  it  all,  like  a  guardian,  the 
cross-crowned  summit  of  the  Kobelspitze,  it  was  like  being 
transported  into  another  world,  with  all  the  feelings  of  life, 
its  ways  and  motives  and  sentiments,  suddenly  made  other. 
The  noise  of  commerce  was  far  away;  and  here  among  the  hills 
a  little  community  of  peasants  were  feeding  their  souls  year 
after  year  on  that  same  prophetic  and  historic  theme,  "the 
sufferings  of  Christ  and  the  glory  that  should  follow;"  and  the 
whole  atmosphere  of  their  little  world  was  made  sweet  and 
calm  by  it.  I  wonder  if  it  was  not  so,  in  truer  reality  and 
degree,  on  this  mountain  of  Transfiguration,  when  the  dis- 
ciples trembled  as  they  entered  into  the  cloud,  and  found  the 
glory  almost  too  great  for  their  waking  sense  to  endure.  Yet 
it  was  a  real  world,  and  adapted  to  their  souls;  so  restful  and 
congenial  that  Peter  wanted  to  make  tabernacles  and  stay 
there.  May  it  not  have  been  a  momentary  unveiling,  for  love 
and  humanity's  sake,  of  what  is  always  near,  always  present, 
waiting  only  till  the  Christ-formed  manhood  has  eyes  to  see 


258  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

and  heart  to  appropriate?  How  like  it  is  to  that  vision  of  the 
supreme  world-day  which  a  poet  has  thus  put  into  words: 

Soon  the  whole, 

Like  a  parched-up  scroll, 
Shall  before  my  amazed  eyes  uproll; 

And  without  one  screen, 

At  one  burst  be  seen 
The   presence    wherein    I   have    ever   been. 

It  were  over-curious,  perhaps,  to  assert  this;  but  how  fruitful 
the  whole  scene  is  of  imaginings.  And  especially  it  sets  us 
wondering  whether,  after  all,  the  transition  to  the  unseen  world 
may  not  be  a  much  less  violent  and  catastrophic  thing  than  our 
fears  have  figured;  and  whether  it  may  not  be  in  us  so  to  live 
that  all  the  likeness  and  congeniality  of  it,  save  the  sudden 
rapturous  moment  of  entrance,  may  already  be  full-formed  in 
our  nature.  At  any  rate,  here,  to  my  mind,  is  the  unending 
marvel  of  the  scene:  the  chill  and  wrench  of  death  is  totally 
absent,  unreal,  abolished.  As  Tennyson  expressed  it  of  cer- 
tain trance-like  states  of  his,  death  seems  here  an  almost 
laughable  impossibility;  and  yet  this  is  no  trance  but  a  sane 
and  matter-of-fact  opening  of  the  accessible  realm  where  mor- 
tality is  swallowed  up  of  life.  This  is  what  the  Transfigura- 
tion event  looks  like  to  me;  and  as  such  it  is  not  an  exhibition 
or  performance  but  a  most  weighty  revelation  of  the  signifi- 
cance of  life.  Here,  if  anywhere  in  the  Bible,  is  unveiled  the 
world  eternally  beyond  death,  beyond  the  bounds  of  time,  and 
far  within  the  encompassing  limits  of  space  and  race  and 
cramping  custom.  And  an  essential  part  of  it  is  that  strange 
mystic  change  of  form,  the  same,  it  would  seem,  that  St.  Paul 
afterward  calls  the  spiritual  body  which  he  regards  as  forming 
itself  within  us  all  the  while,  and  which  is  just  as  real  and  con- 
gruous as  the  rest;  a  thing  which  he  even  dares  to  make  the 
subject  of  a  Christian  command.  "Be  not  conformed,"  he 
says,  "to  this  world:  but  be  ye  transformed"  —  transfigured, 
metamorphosed,  precisely  the  same  word  as  used  here — "by 
the  renewing  of  your  mind."  Nor  is  it  the  mind  alone  that  is 
concerned;  for  this  command  comes  just  at  the  heels  of  an 


THE  SUPREME  HISTORIC   VENTURE      259 

injunction  to  present  our  bodies  a  living  sacrifice,  holy,  accept- 
able unto  God,  which  is  our  reasonable  service.  Can  it  be, 
then,  that  in  a  true  sense  transfiguration  is  in  the  list  of  the 
new  life's  duties,  as  if  it  were  the  most  rational  thing  in  the 
world  for  us,  whose  citizenship  is  in  heaven,  to  seek  those 
things  which  are  above,  where  Christ  sitteth  at  the  right  hand 
of  God?  And  have  we  not  here  a  glimpse  of  the  scenery  and 
the  company  that  we  are  in,  just,  as  it  were,  beyond  the  violet 
rays  of  our  spectrum?  It  is  not  for  me  to  say;  but  such,  in 
our  grand  poetic  justice,  seems  to  be  the  Bible  assumption. 

Here  we  must  pause  to  note  another  thing  which  seems  here 
brought  to  light:  a  discrimination  so  momentous  that  we  can 
only  deem  the  event  which  makes  it  clear  one  of  the  greatest 
boons  ever  vouchsafed  to  a  dimly-seeing  humanity.  If,  a*s 
intimated,  transfiguration  and  resurrection  are  correlative,  ex- 
plaining each  other,  if  here  we  are  looking  for  once  at  the  very 
core  and  article  of  eternal  life,  then  we  see  how  distinct  from 
it,  nay  opposed  to  it,  are  all  men's  vague  notions  of  immor- 
tality, in  the  sense  of  a  survival  of  soul,  separate  from  the 
body.  This  is  the  thing  that  men  have  always  dreamed  of  and 
psychic  research  is  trying  to  prove;  fastening  their  eyes  al- 
ways not  on  life  but  on  death,  as  the  necessary  prelude  which 
must  somehow  be  resolved.  Jesus  had  called  people  back  from 
death;  the  young  man  at  Nain,  the  daughter  of  Jairus;  and  in 
a  few  weeks  he  would  do  a  more  wonderful  thing  still,  calling 
back  Lazarus  from  his  four  days'  entombment.  But  these  were 
not  resurrection;  they  brought  no  higher  thing  with  them; 
they  were  only  resuscitation.  They  are  not  in  the  class  with 
this  event  at  all.  They  left  the  resuscitated  body  still  as 
mortal  as  ever;  and  all  the  process  of  dying  had  in  time  to  be 
undergone  over  again.  Our  Lord  did  not  set  store  by  these 
miracles,  as  in  any  way  enriching  the  sum-total  of  life.  His 
ministry  was  otherwise  directed;  directed  to  an  uprise  of  life, 
inner  and  outer,  wherein  there  should  be  no  separation  and 
joining  again,  no  ruins  and  subsequent  repair,  no  wreck  and 
dubious  survival,  but  one  integral  wholeness  of  tissue  and  har- 
mony of  progress  and  birth  to  the  new  range  of  being  to  which 


26o  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

manhood  is  bound.  By  the  side  of  this,  even  as  here  fleetingly 
glimpsed,  how  paltry  appear  men's  crude  notions  of  a  piece- 
meal survival  of  death.  His  miracles  of  resuscitation  from  the 
dead  serve  a  useful  purpose,  if  only  for  the  object-lesson  they 
afford;  we  have  in  them  something  to  set  over  against  the 
larger  reality;  we  can  sense  by  them  how  small  a  part  death 
plays  in  the  grand  total  of  evolutionary  uprise.  And  here  on 
Mount  Hermon,  far  more  truly  than  at  the  grave  of  Lazarus, 
here  by  His  mingling  with  the  great  minds  of  the  ages  and  by 
the  revealed  splendor  which  is  so  obviously  His  native  element, 
He  has  vouchsafed  to  men  a  view  of  the  summit  to  which  the 
Son  of  man,  bringing  with  Him  the  bidding  for  all  men  to  hear 
and  become  with  Him  sons  of  God,  has  at  length  ascended. 
It  is  high;  but  humanity  too  is  there,  intact  and  glorious. 

The  splendor  of  the  hour  faded,  and  when  it  was  over  the 
disciples  again  saw  no  man  save  Jesus  only;  but  from  this 
hour  onward  this  wonderful  event  registered'  the  true  measure 
of  Him.  Henceforth,  Head  of  the  family  in  heaven  and  earth, 
He  moved  consciously  among  the  eternal  verities,  lived  and 
thought  and  spoke  as  to  the  manner  born.  His  consciousness 
seemed  to  be  enlarged  in  the  time  direction,  as  well  as  in  the 
space  direction.  He  spoke  of  Himself  in  terms  deeper  than 
human;  calmly  assumed  to  be  contemporary  with  the  men  of 
old.  "Verily,  I  say  unto  you,"  He  boldly  told  the  Jewish 
elders,  "before  Abraham  was,  I  am."  He  met  the  Sadducees' 
denial  of  resurrection,  and  proved  that  resurrection  is  a  pres- 
ent fact,  by  the  truth,  to  Him  as  evident  as  the  existence  of 
God,  that  Abraham  and  Isaac  and  Jacob  are  alive.  He  spoke 
to  Pilate  of  His  kingly  purpose  in  coming  into  the  world,  in 
just  such  terms  as  one  uses  who  is  moving  in  the  consciousness 
of  preexistence.  We  can  little  understand  this  now;  we  need 
the  completed  resurrection  to  explain  it;  but  we  can  see  the 
harmony  of  it  with  all  the  rest  of  His  life,  the  poetic  justice 
of  the  tremendous  drama  He  was  enacting.  And  is  not  that 
very  grace  and  truth  of  His,  so  at  one  with  the  eternal  mind 
of  God,  the  clearest  road  to  the  realization  of  the  mystery; 
may  not  a  love  so  large  have  carried  with  it  the  timeless  con- 


THE   SUPREME  HISTORIC   VENTURE      261 

sciousness  of  eternal  personality?  Do  we  not  even  in  our 
earthly  love,  when  it  reaches  its  purest  expression  in  perfect 
union  with  another  soul,  have  the  sense  of  an  eternal  new 
world  opening,  and  as  if  here  were  a  pulsation  from  a  limitless 
past?  Of  this  sacred  experience  I  may  not  speak  out;  I  leave 
each  of  you  to  think  how  it  has  been  in  your  own  soul.  In 
a  recent  play  it  has  been  put  into  question  and  answer;  where- 
in a  poet,  sensitive  to  the  purest  breath  of  love,  comes  to  feel 
that  his  soul  has  found  its  perfect  mating.  "How  old  are  you, 
Eugene?"  he  is  asked.  His  answer  is  one  that  none  of  us  will 
read  as  meaningless:  "As  old  as  the  world  now.  This  morning 
I  was  eighteen."  This  sounds  almost  flippant,  perhaps,  by  the 
side  of  our  larger  subject;  but  the  supreme  venture  of  history 
has  labored  to  prove  that  love  is  as  old  as  the  world,  and  He 
who  committed  Himself  to  the  proof  speaks  just  as  if  He  had 
entered  into  the  secret  of  that  consciousness.  When  we  have 
fathomed  the  greatness  of  His  Messianic  personality  we  shall 
be  slow  to  deny  to  Him  the  ability  to  say  the  word,  "Before 
Abraham  was,  I  am." 

While  we  are  on  this  high  ground,  though  we  cannot  now 
build  tabernacles  and  stay,  we  must  needs  note  one  more  thing. 
In  the  light  of  the  evolution  we  have  traced,  with  all  its  trans- 
cendent elements,  this  change  of  form  into  a  spiritual  body 
seems,  and  I  think  is  revealed  to  be,  the  natural  transition  of 
the  completed  manhood  from  this  earthly  stage  of  being  to  the 
stage  beyond.  It  is  the  way  that  is  taken  when  death  is 
abolished.  It  registers  the  supreme  effect  of  the  spirit  of 
Christ  on  the  whole  life,  body  and  all.  He  might  have  gone 
out  that  way;  for  already  the  gate  stands  open;  it  was  the 
next  step.  His  fulness  of  love  had  already  proved  too  strong 
for  death  to  handle;  there  was  nothing  for  corruption  and 
decay  to  lay  hold  of.  It  perfectly  suits  with  the  logic  and  fit- 
ness of  things  that  this  should  have  been  the  absorption  of  His 
life  into  the  higher  stage  and  element;  the  whole  current  of 
His  being  drew  that  way.  Amazing  as  it  may  seem,  this  trans- 
figuration of  Christ,  so  far  from  being  a  miracle,  looks  like 
the  most  natural  and  as  it  were  scientific  outcome  of  the  his- 


262  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

tory  we  have  traced.  Its  theoretical  claims  are  satisfied.  We 
could  never  have  impeached  His  perfect  sinlessness,  His  com- 
plete realization  of  manhood,  His  divine  wisdom  of  word  and 
work,  if  when  Moses  and  Elijah  vanished  from  men's  sight, 
He  too  had  vanished  with  them  and  been  seen  no  more.  If  it 
were  only  law  and  merit  and  righteousness  that  He  came  to 
fulfil,  here  was  the  fitting  crown  and  ending. 

But  right  here,  though  our  thoughts  of  this  story  have 
mounted  from  height  to  dizzy  height,  we  must  reopen  the  case 
higher  still,  and  note  the  thing  which,  as  Browning  phrases  it, 
"shall  crown  him  the  topmost,  ineffablest  crown."  All  this 
opportunity  to  enter  the  fulness  and  glory  of  life  He  puts  aside 
without  regret,  without  flinching;  His  chosen  way,  the  way  to 
which  His  love  for  men  points,  is  other.  There  below  Him, 
all  over  the  world,  are  men  sinning,  struggling,  laboring,  dying; 
even  now,  while  He  is  standing  beyond  the  reach  of  death,  a 
hapless  boy  on  the  plain  below  is  writhing  in  the  full  possession 
of  "him  that  hath  the  power  of  death,  that  is,  the  devil,"  and 
no  one,  not  even  the  disciples,  can  help  him.  But  if  He  goes 
now,  what  of  all  these?  If  He  goes  now,  how  shall  men  lay 
hold  on  the  same  power  of  life  that  is  in  Him,  and  make  it  also 
their  own?  Something  more  is  needed  than  that  it  shall 
be  shown  to  them,  and  then,  when  its  wonder  is  greatest, 
be  withdrawn.  He  himself  would  not  hold  His  life  on  such 
terms;  and  heaven  would  not  be  heaven  to  Him  if  the  door 
were  shut  from  any  who  were  in  uttermost  need.  So  here,  at 
the  very  door  of  light  and  peace  and  reward,  He  turns  away, 
and  goes  down  the  mountain  slope  toward  Gethsemane  and 
Calvary.  It  is  no  more  as  if  He  had  to  die.  This  very  scene 
has  demonstrated  that  He  does  not  have  to  die,  that  He  has 
the  power  to  escape  the  mortal  lot  of  man.  It  is  in  the  very 
consciousness  of  this  power  that  He  takes  His  life  in  His  hand 
and  offers  it  as  a  sacrifice  on  the  cross.  "I  have  power,"  He 
says,  "to  lay  it  down,  and  I  have  power  to  take  it  again."  It 
is  the  freedom  of  truth  that  thus  speaks;  and  in  the  light  of 
this  His  obedience  to  the  death  of  the  cross  acquires  an  in- 
effable grandeur. 


THE  SUPREME  HISTORIC   VENTURE      263 

So  though  for  merit's  sake  He  might  now  receive  His  wages, 
for  love's  sake  He  will  live  out  this  human  life  to  the  ending, 
and  sound  the  depths  of  all  the  experience  that  sinful  man  must 
sound.  This  death,  being  the  supreme  expression  of  love,  has 
thus  become  an  active  principle  of  life,  a  thing  taken  and  ap- 
plied to  the  salvation  of  the  world.  As  He  regarded  it,  it  is 
like  a  seed  sown  in  the  ground,  which  by  its  very  death  and 
rising  again  bears  much  fruit. 

To  what  depths  of  spiritual  suffering,  to  what  abysses  of  the 
underworld  of  being  this  chosen  road  of  death  led  Jesus,  we 
can  little  know;  we  can  only  veil  our  faces  before  it.  This 
aspect  of  His  life  presented  itself  to  Him  as  like  a  cup  which 
He  must  not  only  taste  but  drain  to  the  dregs.  Earlier  in  His 
ministry  we  hear  Him  asking  His  disciples,  "Can  ye  drink  of 
my  cup?"  and  predicting  that  they  shall  do  so,  though  they 
are  so  little  aware  what  it  means.  But  as  He  approaches  the 
actual  setting  of  the  cup  to  His  lips,  it  requires  the  utmost  that 
is  in  His  manhood  to  nerve  Himself  to  it;  it  seems  to  be  some- 
thing by  the  side  of  which  standing  before  Pilate  is  almost  an 
insignificant  thing.  The  first  shrinking  of  spirit  from  the  tre- 
mendous thing  before  Him  was  shown  when  the  Greeks  came 
to  inquire  of  Him,  and  get,  so  to  say,  His  manifesto,  His  ac- 
count of  what  His  mission  meant.  "Now  is  my  soul  troubled; 
and  what  shall  I  say?  Father,  save  me  from  this  hour.  But 
for  this  cause  came  I  unto  this  hour."  Then  He  went  on  to 
speak  of  the  corn  of  wheat  dying,  and  of  His  being  lifted  up 
from  the  earth;  and  as  in  the  same  connection  He  prayed, 
"Father  glorify  thy  name,"  there  came  the  third  voice  of  ap- 
proval from  heaven,  as  it  had  come  before,  at  His  baptism  and 
transfiguration,  "I  have  both  glorified  it,  and  will  glorify  it 
again."  This  was  His  last  sign  of  the  Father's  approval;  but 
as  the  awful  gloom  deepened  it  was  enough;  His  spirit  held 
out.  We  hear  Him  later  praying  in  Gethsemane  that  if  it  be 
possible  the  cup  may  pass;  but  always  with  the  addition  of 
uttermost  obedience,  "Nevertheless,  not  as  I  will,  but  as  thou 
wilt."  Then  a  few  hours  of  indignity  and  silence  and  brave 
witness  for  the  truth;  then  the  crash  of  the  nails  through  His 


264  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

feet  and  hands,  and  the  prayer  for  their  forgiveness;  then  that 
strange  cry  as  from  an  unfathomable  depth,  "My  God,  my 
God,  why  hast  thou  forsaken  me?"  We  cannot  understand 
it  all;  there  is  an  uttermost  of  divinity  as  well  as  of  humanity 
in  it  which  stretches  away  beyond  us  and  beyond  our  earth. 
We  only  know  that  it  was  in  the  road  of  what  He  freely  chose 
to  taste  for  men,  and  for  every  man;  we  know  too  that  here 
on  the  cross,  as  put  in  words  in  Gethsemane,  there  was  utter- 
most surrender  of  the  human,  with  all  its  depths  of  life  and 
love  and  faith,  to  the  will  of  the  divine.  And  in  a  few  hours 
more  the  cup  is  drained,  the  spirit  has  survived  its  shrinking 
and  conquered,  and  the  final  word  is  rereXeo-rat,  "it  is 
finished." 

When  Jesus  went  down  the  transfiguration  mountain  toward 
Calvary,  He  went  not  only  in  love,  a  love  which  would  leave 
no  son  of  man  out  of  His  beneficence,  but  He  went  also  in  faith, 
just  such  faith  as  you  and  I  have  in  something  that  we 
have  not  verified,  and  therefore  do  not  know.  He  knew,  by 
this  touch  of  His  glorification,  that  there  was  a  way  to  the 
higher  existence  wherein  death  was  abolished.  He  believed  that 
that  same  higher  existence  was  approachable  through  death, 
and  to  this  belief,  not  as  knowledge  but  as  a  sublime  experi- 
ment, He  committed  Himself.  That  meant  committal  to  all 
that  it  involved.  His  surrender  to  death  was  in  just  as  good 
faith,  and  with  as  little  experimental  knowledge,  as  if  death 
were  to  be  utter  extinction  of  being  or  the  ending  it  seems  to 
be.  He  said  He  had  power  to  take  His  life  again;  but  no  man 
had  done  it,  nor  had  He  anything  but  His  sublime  faith  to 
make  the  assertion  on.  After  all,  to  surrender  Himself  thus 
to  death  was  going  into  the  black;  it  was  a  colossal  venture  of 
faith,  a  venture  on  the  supreme  vitalizing  power  of  love. 

And  as  the  apostles  soon  began  to  preach,  the  great  com- 
mittal was  fully  justified;  the  venture,  the  experiment,  proved 
its  success  and  opened  a  new  world  of  life  and  truth  to  men. 
Death  wrought  its  worst  on  Him,  in  agony  and  suffering;  but 
death  could  not  hold  Him.  It  had  merely  added  one  more  in- 
gredient in  His  sum  of  holiest  manhood  life.  When,  a  few 


THE   SUPREME  HISTORIC   VENTURE      265 

days  later,  He  appeared  in  another  form  to  two  of  the  disciples 
as  they  went  into  the  country,  His  triumphant  question  to  them 
was,  "Ought  not  Christ  to  have  suffered  these  things,  and  to 
have  entered  into  his  glory?"  He  had  made  the  mightiest 
venture  that  manhood  had  ever  made,  had  sounded  the  ex- 
tremest  depths  of  love  and  faith,  had  turned  the  doubtfulness 
and  gloom  of  our  human  life  into  sunlit  eternal  certainty;  and 
yet  all  this  in  the  sanest  and  most  self-evidencing  way,  the 
way  that  when  it  was  seen  must  needs  appeal  to  every  true 
man.  He  had  royally  and  consistently  done  what  as  Christ, 
as  Son  of  man,  He  ought  to  do. 


VI 

NATURALIZING  THE  ACCOMPLISHED  FACT 

HOW   TEEIS   SOLUTION   OF   THE   LIFE   PROBLEM   WAS 
INTERPRETED   TO   THE   WORLD 

I.  EYE-WITNESSES    OF    His    MAJESTY 

II.  SINAI  VERSUS  SIGN 

III.  THE  MIND  OF  SAINT  JOHN 

IV.  THE  MIND  OF  SAINT  PAUL 


VI 

NATURALIZING  THE  ACCOMPLISHED   FACT 

THE  most  momentous  single  word  ever  spoken  in 
this  world,  most  momentous  and  most  abysmally 
significant,  was  that  last  word  spoken  from 
the  cross,  rereXeo-rai,  "It  is  finished."  We  can  never  hope 
to  comprehend  more  than  one  half  of  its  meaning,  until 
we  are  where  we  can  see  it  from  the  other  and 
inner  side.  It  is  the  announcement  of  a  great  accom- 
plished fact,  as  great  as  the  whole  history  and  evolution 
of  man;  a  fact  on  which  through  the  growing  ages  God  and 
man  have  been  working  together  in  a  mighty  partnership.  On 
the  evening  before  the  word  was  spoken  Jesus  had  said  to  the 
Father:  "I  have  glorified  thee  on  the  earth;  I  have  finished  the 
work  which  thou  gavest  me  to  do.  And  now,  O  Father,  glorify 
thou  me  with  thine  own  self  with  the  glory  which  I  had  with 
thee  before  the  world  was."  Some  colossal  thing  is  recognized 
here  which,  even  before  Gethsemane  or  the  arrest  or  the  cruel 
execution,  is  already  complete;  what  remains  is  only  making 
it  plain  in  the  sight  of  men.  Throughout  the  huddled  scene 
of  the  cross  too,  as  through  the  swift  turmoil  of  arrest  in  the 
garden,  there  is  on  His  part  the  same  note  of  deliberateness, 
calmness,  as  of  one  who  is  bringing  everything  into  final  order, 
even  down  to  the  details  of  caring  for  His  family  and  His  fol- 
lowers. "Of  them  which  thou  gavest  me  have  I  lost  none," 
was  His  word  about  His  disciples,  fulfilled  by  His  letting  them 
go  their  way  in  Gethsemane;  and  you  remember  too  how,  when 
He  had  committed  His  mother  to  the  beloved  disciple's  care, 
He  knew  then  that  all  things  were  now  accomplished,  and  re- 
ceived the  vinegar  and  spoke  the  final  word.  About  this  going 
out  which  He  accomplished  at  Jerusalem  there  was  nothing 

269 


270  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

hurried  or  disordered,  as  if  it  were  a  catastrophe;  no  loose  and 
ravelled  ends  of  life  and  speech.  It  was  the  same  on  the  third 
morning  afterward,  when  the  tomb  was  found  empty;  no 
marks  there,  as  it  were,  of  a  sudden  tumult  of  triumph,  but 
the  linen  clothes  lying  neatly  together  and  the  napkin  folded 
in  a  place  by  itself.  From  greatest  things  to  smallest,  the  world 
could  see  not  only  a  tremendous  finished  work  but  the  minutest 
finishing  touches,  as  if  every  proper  and  tasteful  impulse  of  a 
finely  touched  nature  would  be  satisfied.  How  that  word  "It 
is  finished'7  seems  to  enlarge  and  expand,  upward  and  down- 
ward and  inward  and  outward,  until  it  fills  the  horizon  of  the 
universe  full. 

The  great  fact  is  now  accomplished;  Jesus  names  this  in 
terms  of  glory.  He  had  in  all  the  lowly  deeds  of  His  life  glori- 
fied the  Father;  the  Father,  answering  at  every  step,  down  to 
the  deepest  and  obscurest,  but  culminatingly  in  this  final  lifting 
up  from  the  earth,  had  glorified  Him.  Here  at  last  was  the  long 
event,  emerging  from  the  unseen  places  of  the  universe,  in 
which  God  and  manhood  were  in  full  harmony  together,  each 
revealing  the  plan  that  had  eternally  occupied  his  spirit,  each 
seen  as  he  is,  in  the  central  truth  of  universal  being,  in  the 
unitary  Life  Indeed.  You  remember  how  St.  John  afterward 
described  it:  "That  which  was  from  the  beginning,  which  we 
have  heard,  which  we  have  seen  with  our  eyes,  which  we  have 
looked  upon,  and  our  hands  have  handled,  of  the  Word  of 
life;  (for  the  life  was  manifested,  and  we  have  seen  it,  and 
bear  witness,  and  shew  unto  you  that  eternal  life,  which  was 
with  the  Father,  and  was  manifested  unto  us)."  He  seems  to 
strain  language  almost  to  breaking-point  to  make  apprehen- 
sible something  which,  for  all  its  ineffable  greatness,  was  yet 
so  real  here  under  the  sun.  The  only  word  that  can  be  used 
to  name  this,  both  on  its  earthly  and  heavenly  side,  is  glory. 
Let  us  think  of  this  word  a  moment.  It  is  one  of  those  words, 
of  which  there  are  not  a  few  in  Scripture,  that  have  to  be  taken 
from  men's  commonplace  conceptions  and  vocabulary  and 
crowded  with  new  meaning  to  suit  new  and  larger  realities. 

I  like  to  think  of  it  in  connection  with  that  name  which  the 


THE  ACCOMPLISHED  FACr  271 

Hebrew  was  somehow  guided  to  give  to  God,  and  which  you 
know  became  so  sacred  and  withdrawn  that  he  dared  not  pro- 
nounce it:  the  name  Jehovah,  or  Jahaveh,  which  you  know 
means,  "He  who  is,"  or  "That  which  is."  A  pregnant  and 
penetrative  name  this:  the  very  discovery  or  invention  of  it 
was  a  kind  of  incentive  to  truth.  For  it  always  seemed  to  me 
as  if  what  under  this  term  the  Hebrew  was  seeking  and  wor- 
shipping and  trying  to  explore  was  just  reality,  the  ultimate 
reality  of  things,  that  which  is  rather  than  seems,  that  which 
remains  rather  than  changes  or  passes.  The  Hebrew  mind, 
even  in  its  devoutness  and  religion,  was  thus  essentially  like 
the  scientific  mind:  it  was  set  toward  what  is  actual,  true,  lit- 
eral, real,  and  it  valued  finding  that.  Its  bent  of  worship  and 
belief,  too,  corresponded;  for  the  Hebrew  was  looking  always 
for  signs,  tokens,  or  as  we  may  say  effects,  which  would  indi- 
cate what  the  reality  is,  and  what  the  character  of  His  work- 
ing; this  is  what  St.  Paul  recognizes  when  he  says  the  Jews 
seek  after  a  sign;  our  Lord  too  appeals  to  the  same  national 
trait.  What  is  the  sign  of  the  deepest  reality  of  things,  of  the 
highest  reality  of  life?  In  a  true  sense  we  may  say  the  trend 
of  the  Hebrew  genius  was  toward  the  answer  to  this  question. 
And  the  name  they  gave  to  this  sign  or  evidence  of  God's  pres- 
ence or  working,  glory,  started  from  the  idea  of  weight  or  abun- 
dance or  splendor.  That  is  how  they  figured  the  glory  of  God, 
and  perhaps  the  palpable  values  of  life :  splendor,  the  splendor 
of  wealth  and  abundance  and  honor.  If  God  should  appear  it 
would  be  in  a  splendor  beyond  mortal  power  to  endure.  The 
Greeks  too  had  a  word  for  glory,  the  word  that  the  New  Tes- 
tament employs;  and  this  word,  in  its  primal  meaning,  was 
accurately  keyed  to  the  mind  of  a  people  who,  as  St.  Paul  says, 
seek  after  wisdom,  who  are  inclined  to  philosophize  on  things. 
It  comes  from  the  word  to  think  or  estimate;  and  to  the 
Greeks  the  glory  of  God  or  of  man  is  what  we  are  to  think  of 
him  at  his  best,  truest,  deepest,  highest;  what  he  is  to  be  to 
our  minds  rather  than  our  senses,  when  we  fathom  his  being 
as  it  really  is.  When  therefore  Jesus  glorified  God,  and  God 
glorified  Jesus,  the  splendor  that  the  word  glory  gave  to  the 


272  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

idea  was  not  merely  an  outward  thing,  an  insufferable  bright- 
ness, but  an  inward  thing  which  could  shine  in  the  secret  place 
of  the  soul,  and  which,  equally  real  and  true,  could  coexist 
even  with  ignominy  and  persecution  and  death,  and  could  shine 
through  the  humblest  deeds.  The  word  had  become  large 
enough  in  Jesus'  use  of  it,  and  He  Himself  so  enriched  its 
meaning,  that  He  could  say  to  the  philosophizing  Greeks  that 
the  Son  of  man  was  at  that  moment  glorified  when  He  was  in 
act,  like  a  corn  of  wheat,  to  fall  into  the  ground  and  die  that 
so  an  abundant  harvest  of  the  truest  life  might  ensue.  And  a 
little  while  afterward,  interpreting  the  same  spirit  of  life,  St. 
Paul  promises  nothing  less  than  life  eternal  to  those  who  by 
patient  continuance  in  well-being  seek  for  glory  and  honor  and 
immortality.  The  glory  of  God,  the  glory  of  the  Son  of  man 
—  what  we  are  to  think  of  them  in  their  beauty  and  brightness 
and  essential  truth,  what  they  are  in  the  light  of  the  great  ac- 
complished fact,  and  what  in  turn  every  man  may  strive  to 
make  his  own  —  too  evidently  it  is  an  unspeakably  great  re- 
ality that  is  revealed  here.  Can  man  bear  the  realization  of 
it,  and  live?  The  Hebrew,  in  the  thought  of  his  sensuous  image 
of  glory,  and  his  ingrained  sense  of  sinfulness,  would  naturally 
doubt  it.  Or  shall  man  not  rather  come  to  himself  and  then 
first  begin  to  live,  when  he  gets  it  into  his  mind  as  it  really  is, 
and  appropriates  if  ever  so  little  a  pulsation  of  it?  This  was 
Christ's  object,  for  which  he  lived  and  died.  That  same  glory 
was  a  thing  not  to  be  exhibited  alone;  not  to  be  wrought  to 
complete  manifestation  and  then  withdrawn;  but  to  be  natural- 
ized and  made  the  manhood  way  of  living.  Once  come,  it  was 
to  remain,  accessible,  available,  fruitful  and  friendly  for  all 
human  kind. 

There  are  some  interesting  signs  that  seem  to  show,  even 
on  the  Hebrew  conception,  that  this  glory  of  the  Son  of  man, 
both  in  its  exaltation  and  in  its  abysm  of  suffering,  had  ele- 
ments too  great  for  a  mortal  to  bear;  only  a  spiritual  body,  it 
would  seem,  could  be  equal  to  it.  On  the  mountain  of  Trans- 
figuration, you  remember,  when  the  exceeding  brightness  came 
and  Moses  and  Elijah  appeared  in  glory,  the  three  disciples 


THE  ACCOMPLISHED  FACT  273 

were  heavy,  stupid  with  sleep,  and  could  only  bear  it,  as  it 
were,  in  a  waking  dream.  And  again  in  Gethsemane,  when  the 
same  glory  was  the  glory  of  surrender  to  the  utmost  of  the 
Father's  will  and  the  bitter  cup,  the  same  disciples,  nearest 
and  most  intimate  as  they  were,  were  cast  into  the  same  heavi- 
ness of  slumber,  and  sensed  it  only  imperfectly.  "What!  could 
ye  not  watch  with  me  one  hour?  The  spirit  is  willing,  but  the 
flesh  is  weak,"  was  the  word  that  expressed  Jesus'  hunger  for 
companionship  yet  readiness  to  excuse  them.  There  was  some- 
thing transcending  earth,  and  too  much  for  the  flesh  to  bear, 
even  in  the  blackness  of  that  experience;  does  it  not  flash  forth 
the  moment  after,  when,  as  soon  as  Jesus  tells  the  approaching 
soldiers  "I  am  he"  they  run  backward  and  fall  to  the  ground? 
They  cannot  lay  hand  on  a  being  so  glorious  (though  the  out- 
ward rays  are  quenched  in  gloom  and  have  become  as  it  were 
actinic),  until  He  gives  them  free  permission.  Other  instances 
are  given,  where  He  walked  through  malignant  mobs  un- 
touched; and  we  recall  how,  in  the  splendor  of  His  great  re- 
solve to  go  up  to  Jerusalem  and  Calvary,  the  disciples  were 
amazed  at  the  grandeur  of  His  presence.  There  were  not  want- 
ing flashes  of  splendor,  the  spiritual  splendor  of  His  native 
element,  all  along  His  earthly  way;  at  the  very  beginning  of 
His  ministry,  among  His  life-long  neighbors  and  acquaintance, 
there  is  a  touch  of  it,  so  that  no  hand  can  be  laid  on  Him  be- 
fore His  time.  Men  can  come  to  Him  and  be  healed;  can  walk 
freely  in  the  light  and  warmth  of  His  gracious  presence;  but 
until  the  work  is  done,  and  His  glory  and  their  flesh  are  tem- 
pered to  each  other,  no  man  can  presume.  "Touch  me  not," 
was  His  warning  word  to  Mary,  "for  I  am  not  yet  ascended 
unto  my  Father."  Yes :  in  all  its  phases  men  beheld  His  glory, 
and  wherever  seen  it  was  the  glory  of  the  Life  Indeed,  full  of 
grace  and  truth. 

We  have  seen  what  the  accomplished  fact,  the  result  of  the 
great  historic  venture  was;  we  have  traced  its  stages  and  its 
vital  principles  from  the  beginning;  and  great  as  it  was  we  have 
found  it  a  fact  for  men.  There  is  indeed  an  element  of  it 
which  can  be  wrought  but  once;  nor  need  it  be  repeated.  The 


274  rHE  LIFE  INDEED 

experiment  of  life  once  conducted  in  full,  with  all  the  condi- 
tions historic  and  other  in  typical  place,  and  the  problem  is 
solved  once  for  all;  manhood  vitalized  by  the  spirit  without 
measure,  has  reached  the  summit  of  its  evolution,  where  life 
and  death  are  its  willing  instruments,  and  the  power  of  the 
tomb  is  abolished,  and  the  way  henceforth  is  resurrection  and 
ascent  to  higher  stages  of  being.  From  this  time  forth  man 
may  know  the  truth  to  which  he  may  witness;  and  there  will 
not  be  wanting  many  a  martyrdom,  and  sufferings  like  those  of 
Christ,  and  hardships  eagerly  undergone,  that  men  may  know 
Him  and  the  power  of  His  resurrection.  But  the  one  death 
that  has  been  chosen  as  the  sacrifice  for  all  remains  unique; 
the  laboratory  work  of  the  Life  Indeed  has  wrought  its  com- 
plete demonstration.  But  there  remains  now  the  work  of 
making  this  great  thing  available;  of  sowing  the  spirit  and 
faith  of  it  among  men;  of  making  it  the  natural  way  of  living. 
Fitting  and  motived  as  it  was,  it  came  with  the  shock  of  sur- 
prise; no  one  was  prepared  to  see  the  venture  come  out  so; 
it  came  to  men  bewildered,  who  must  have  time  to  take  the 
things  of  Christ  and  piece  them  together;  came  to  fisher-folk 
and  publicans  and  laboring  men,  whom  we  do  not  select  to 
be  the  wielders  of  ideas,  but  only  the  livers  of  humble  life. 
And  on  such  it  devolved  to  set  this  accomplished  fact  in  motion 
and  make  it  the  power  of  a  kingdom.  Through  their  life  and 
words  and  work  it  must  be  naturalized,  so  that  in  time  the 
conduct  and  sentiment  and  atmosphere  of  communities,  yes, 
and  the  world,  may  take  the  principle  and  color  of  it.  The 
centre  of  light  and  power  is  established  among  men;  the  ques- 
tion now,  so  to  say,  is  the  question  of  output;  how  the  life  shall 
become  the  light  of  men. 

I.      EYE-WITNESSES    OF    HIS    MAJESTY 

"For  we  have  not  followed  cunningly  devised  fables,  when 
we  made  known  unto  you  the  power  and  coming  of  our  Lord 
Jesus  Christ,  but  were  eye-witnesses  of  his  majesty.  For  he 
received  from  God  the  Father  honor  and  glory,  when  there 


THE  ACCOMPLISHED  FACT  275 

came  such  a  voice  to  him  from  the  excellent  glory,  This  is 
my  beloved  Son,  in  whom  I  am  well  pleased.'  And  this  voice 
which  came  from  heaven  we  heard,  when  we  were  with  him  in 
the  holy  mount."  These  words,  written  by  one  who  calls  him- 
self "Simon  Peter,  a  servant  and  an  apostle  of  Jesus  Christ," 
strike  the  keynote  of  the  earliest  and  simplest  announcement 
of  the  accomplished  fact,  the  wonderful  new  thing  that  had 
come  to  the  world  and  made  itself  known  to  the  eyes  and  ears 
of  men.  It  is  just  the  kind  of  announcement  that  we  should 
first  expect,  suited  to  plain  people  who  want  their  Gospel  plain; 
and  just  the  mirror  of  a  forthright,  bluff,  unmeditative  mind 
such  as  the  gospel  history  leads  us  to  ascribe  to  St.  Peter. 
There  are  no  circumlocutions  here,  no  posturings  of  philosophy, 
no  manufacturing  of  fables,  as  if  it  were  his  business  to  put 
his  explanations  upon  things.  It  takes  its  stand  on  the  basis 
of  simple  concrete  fact.  The  fact  was  so;  we  saw  it;  we  heard 
it.  How  much  the  fact  means,  how  it  connects  itself  with 
our  life  and  the  ideas  by  which  we  have  guided  ourselves 
hitherto,  is  a  thing  for  other  heads  to  work  out.  St.  Paul,  for 
instance,  is  good  at  that  sort  of  thing;  he  has  made  a  study 
of  it,  "and  according  to  the  wisdom  given  unto  him  hath 
written  unto  you."  Some  things  that  he  writes  are  hard  to  be 
understood,  and  men  that  are  not  experts  can  easily  misuse 
his  words  and  turn  them  to  their  own  hurt.  But  I  have  nothing 
to  do  with  those  deep  things;  they  are  beyond  my  unphilo- 
sophic  fisherman  brain;  but  I  can  tell  you  what  I  saw  and 
heard;  and  plain  man  as  I  am,  I  was  one  of  those  who  were 
chosen  to  be  fishers  of  men,  and  one  of  the  three  who,  for  what- 
ever reason,  were  selected  to  be  eye-witnesses  of  the  highest 
majesty  that  human  eyes  could  behold. 

Such  is  the  honest,  humble,  perfectly  transparent  attitude 
assumed  by  the  writer  of  this  second  epistle  of  Peter.  In  re- 
ferring you  to  it,  I  am  not  raising  any  questions  about  the  gen- 
uineness of  this  epistle,  or  when  it  was  written,  or  when  it 
came  unto  the  canon;  I  am  concerned  merely  with  what  it  says, 
and  with  the  mind  it  reveals.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  you  know, 
this  is  one  of  the  epistles  whose  right  critics  question;  in  the 


276  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

general  shaking-up  of  things  that  prevails  nowadays  they  are 
so  tangled  up  with  what  the  church  fathers  say  or  do  not  say 
about  it,  and  perhaps  with  its  very  primitiveness  of  tone,  that 
the  plain  state  of  the  case,  the  line  of  least  resistance,  seems 
to  have  lost  its  chance  with  them.  St.  Paul,  you  know,  speaks 
of  contemporaries  of  his  who  are  "ever  learning  and  never  able 
to  come  to  the  knowledge  of  the  truth";  such  possibilities 
still  exist  among  men.  And  this  at  least  may  be  said  for  it: 
it  speaks  accurately  in  character;  it  suits  so  well  a  man  like 
St.  Peter,  and  what  would  presumably  impress  him  most,  that 
we  must  hold  the  writer  of  it  to  have  been  either  the  man  he 
professes  to  be  or  a  consummate  play-actor  palming  off  an 
assumed  personality  on  men  in  the  interests  of  the  holiest  fact. 
It  either  carries  its  own  transparent  evidence,  or  is  high  in  the 
rank  of  such  literature  as  we  ascribe  to  Shakespeare. 

All  this,  however,  affects  our  real  subject  not  one  whit.  For 
at  any  rate  we  have  here,  just  as  we  have  elsewhere,  a  true  in- 
dication of  what  was  the  staple  of  the  earliest  preaching  of  the 
apostles,  while  still  their  message  was  a  matter  of  plain  fact, 
and  before  the  ferment  of  philosophy  and  theology  supervened. 
It  was  fact  that  the  world  needed  to  know;  it  was  fact  that 
these  unlearned  apostles  gave  them.  Here  was  an  event,  the 
Transfiguration,  with  its  interpretation  vouchsafed  straight 
from  heaven;  an  event  that  by  our  Lord's  own  direction  the 
three  witnesses  kept  quiet  until  they  had  the  resurrection  to 
supplement  it  and  interpret  it  by;  and  this  event,  with  its  still 
larger  supplement,  was  what  they  began  to  announce  just  as 
soon  as  they  understood  it.  The  staple  of  the  earliest  Gospel 
was  simply  the  wonderful  news  that  a  man  who  before  all  the 
world  had  been  put  to  death  was  risen  from  the  dead,  was  alive 
in  the  heavens,  and  was  the  same  Lord  of  men's  life  and  will 
that  He  ever  was.  Here  was  a  new  thing  for  the  world  to 
know:  that  we  have  a  Guide  and  Teacher,  One  who  has  shared 
all  our  life  and  nature,  in  the  bright  region  beyond  death. 
Here  is  a  new  thing:  that  though  He  submitted  freely  to  death, 
death  could  not  hold  Him.  This,  you  remember,  was  Peter's 
own  account  of  the  matter,  in  his  preaching  at  Pentecost: 


THE  ACCOMPLISHED  FACT  277 

"Jesus  of  Nazareth,  a  man  approved  of  God  among  you  by 
miracles  and  wonders  and  signs,  which  God  did  by  him  in  the 
midst  of  you,  as  ye  yourselves  also  know:  him,  being  delivered 
by  the  determinate  counsel  and  foreknowledge  of  God,  ye  have 
taken,  and  by  wicked  hands  have  crucified  and  slain:  whom 
God  hath  raised  up,  having  loosed  the  pains  of  death:  but  it 
was  not  possible  that  he  should  be  holden  of  it.'7  All  the  early 
preaching  was  like  this:  a  statement  of  fact;  an  identification 
of  this  Jesus  with  the  one  whom  the  Jews  well  knew  and  had 
crucified;  a  testimony  that  He  was  a  man  perfectly  just  and 
holy,  with  the  evidence  of  His  divine  spirit  and  power  always 
with  Him;  and  an  assertion  that  this  man  was  risen  from  the 
dead.  Nor  was  the  preaching  confined  to  assertion  of  a  past 
and  accomplished  fact.  Here  you  see  a  present  fact  right  be- 
fore you.  Here  is  a  community  of  men  living  a  strange  and 
new,  enlarged  and  exalted  life;  a  spirit  of  power  and  love  has 
taken  possession  of  them  which  connects  with  this  same  risen 
man;  He  is  still  at  work  healing  diseases,  forgiving  sins,  speak- 
ing as  never  man  spake,  infusing  the  divinest  vitality  into  every 
heart  that  will  welcome  Him,  just  as  He  did  in  the  flesh,  yes, 
and  more  abundantly,  because  He  is  with  the  Father,  the 
source  and  centre  of  all.  Right  from  the  world  into  which  at 
His  ascension  a  cloud  received  Him,  the  world  where  when  we 
entered  into  the  cloud  we  saw  Him  talking  with  glorified  men, 
a  world  that  is  very  near,  nay,  a  world  that  comes  into  our 
souls,  bringing  tongues  of  flame  for  our  speech,  and  vibrations 
of  might  for  our  hands,  and  motions  of  love  for  our  hearts,  and 
the  very  breath  of  joy  and  goodwill  to  intensify  our  life;  right 
from  this  world  come  continual  messages  of  good,  and  light 
and  life  are  coursing  back  and  forth,  ascending  and  descending, 
as  did  the  angels  in  Jacob's  vision.  The  veil  is  rent;  the  bar- 
riers are  down;  all  is  one  world  now,  seen  and  unseen;  and  the 
spirit  of  the  divine  is  closer  than  breathing,  and  nearer  than 
hands  and  feet.  And  this  is  just  what  has  been  prophesied, 
what  from  the  days  of  the  prophet  Joel  men  have  looked  and 
longed  for;  the  Holy  Spirit  coming  upon  men  and  making  new 
men  of  them;  putting  in  them  the  full  salvation,  health,  whole- 


278  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

ness  of  being,  delivering  them  from  the  bondage  of  lust  and 
sin,  making  them  partakers  of  that  eternal  life  of  which  the 
hour  of  transfiguration  made  us  eye-witnesses,  and  which  the 
resurrection  redeemed  from  the  fell  empire  of  death.  Such  was 
their  enthusiastic  announcement;  and  let  not  the  tremendous 
content  and  involvement  of  it  blind  us  to  the  essential  sim- 
plicity and  forthrightness  of  it.  It  is  not  a  theology  that  these 
plain  men  are  bringing:  it  is  a  fact  which  has  grown  in  form 
and  beauty  through  a  ministry  and  a  death  and  a  resurrection, 
and  has  orbed  into  reality  and  meaning  until  that  same  Jesus 
"hath  shed  forth  this  which  ye  do  see  and  hear."  We  have  seen 
it  all;  have  been  confused  and  bewildered  by  it  even  to  its  un- 
expected outcome;  but  now  we  know  what  it  is,  and  identify 
all  its  parts  and  stages,  and  cannot  but  speak  of  the  things 
which  we  have  seen  and  heard. 

So  these  apostles  took  hold  of  the  strange  new  thing  by  the 
simplest  handle,  the  handle  of  the  actual  and  the  real.  To 
them  it  was  first  of  all  just  what  St.  Paul  called  it  afterward, 
the  coming  of  life  and  immortality  to  light.  St.  Peter's  forth- 
right mind,  wherein  there  was  only  one  vigorous  leap  from  fact 
to  conclusion,  was  just  the  mind  to  have  the  first  dealing  with 
it.  In  his  explanation  of  the  Pentecost  event,  you  remember, 
he  fastens  at  once  on  that  prophecy  of  David's  in  the  sixteenth 
psalm,  where  the  psalmist's  soul  rests  in  hope  that  God  will 
not  leave  him  in  the  underworld  nor  suffer  His  holy  one  to  see 
corruption.  No  more  significant  word  of  old  could  possily 
have  been  chosen;  it  is  the  most  telling  prophecy  of  immor- 
tality in  the  Old  Testament.  And  this,  he  says,  has  come  glori- 
ously true:  the  resurrection  of  Christ  has  put  it  into  fact,  and 
this  pouring  forth  of  the  Holy  Spirit  has  put  it  into  power,  a 
gift  of  life  for  all  men.  It  is  now  actually  in  the  world,  a  real 
and  available  thing,  to  be  domesticated  and  naturalized  in  the 
common  life  of  men. 

The  name  that  the  apostles  forthwith  gave  to  their  message, 
and  that  covered  its  whole  essential  content,  corresponded  ac- 
curately to  this  simple  conception  of  it:  it  was  evayy^Xio^, 
"good  news/'  the  report  of  a  radiant  new  fact  from  heaven,  new 


THE  ACCOMPLISHED  FACT  279 

boon  for  earth.  When  they  chose  a  new  man  to  announce  it, 
Matthias,  so  that  their  number  twelve  might  be  made  intact 
after  the  defection  of  Judas,  they  chose  him  because  he  too  had 
been  an  eye-witness  of  the  resurrection,  and  therefore  could 
testify  to  fact  and  tell  the  good  news  at  first  hand.  And  their 
manner  of  telling  it  was  preaching,  not  arguing  or  philosophiz- 
ing but  just  proclaiming;  the  foolishness  of  preaching,  St.  Paul 
calls  it;  but  it  was  the  direct  way  of  bringing  fact  to  men,  a 
simple  report  of  the  actual,  sowing  concrete  fact  among  men 
and  letting  it  work  as  it  would.  That  was  enough  for  them 
to  do;  that  contained  its  own  power.  For,  as  George  Eliot  puts 


For  Fact,  well-trusted,   reasons  and   persuades, 

Is  gnomic,  cutting,  or  ironical, 

Draws  tears,  or  is  a  tocsin  to  arouse  — 

Can  hold  all  figures  of  the  orator 

In   one   plain   sentence;   has  her  pauses   too  — 

Eloquent  silence  at  the  chasm  abrupt 

Where  knowledge  ceases. 

Out  of  the  fact  that  manhood  is  risen  from  the  grave,  such 
full-orbed  manhood  as  we  have  seen  with  our  eyes  and  our 
hands  have  handled,  comes  all  the  light  of  life. 

Now  I  have  dwelt  on  this  aspect  of  the  case  because  it  cor- 
responds so  precisely  with  the  quasi-scientific  view  of  things 
which  we  have  regarded  the  Bible  as  taking  as  the  grand  text- 
book of  life  and  immortality.  We  have  looked  at  Christ's  life 
as  a  supreme  historic  venture,  a  laboratory  work  of  love  and 
faith,  the  most  colossal  scientific  experiment  that  was  ever  un- 
dertaken and  carried  to  the  profoundest  depths.  No  element 
of  the  problem  was  evaded  or  omitted.  When  He  went  down 
the  slope  of  Hermon  toward  the  cup  of  Gethsemane  and  the 
agony  of  the  cry,  "Eli,  Eli,  lama  sabachthani,"  He  was  ap- 
proaching the  very  abysm  of  being,  infinitely  farther  than  we 
could  follow,  where  prophets  and  angels  could  only  look  in 
wonder.  And  now  this  announcement  of  fact  is  an  announce- 
ment that  the  tremendous  experiment  has  issued  in  complete 
success.  The  long  laboratory  work  of  the  ages,  the  long  wit- 


280  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

nessing  of  the  spirit  of  God  with  the  spirit  of  man,  has  at  the 
fulness  of  the  time  completed  its  work  of  growth  and  freedom; 
manhood  has  wrought  its  redemption  through  the  law  of  the 
spirit  of  life;  and  the  doors  of  the  higher  evolution  stand  wide 
open.  The  plain  visible  fact  of  the  light  of  day  has  joined 
hands  with  the  large  ongoings  of  heaven  and  earth,  and  men 
have  discovered  the  identity. 


II.      SINAI    VERSUS    SIGN 

So  the  accomplished  fact,  as  soon  as  resurrection  and  as- 
cension set  the  seal  to  it,  became  forthwith  a  fact  not  past  but 
present;  it  was  a  new  dynamic  in  humanity;  and  from  this 
time  forth,  as  the  wonders  of  the  day  of  Pentecost  proved,  men 
could  avail  themselves  of  the  same  power  of  life  which  had 
raised  Jesus  from  the  dead.  The  power  was  abroad  in  the 
world:  it  was  transforming  and  transfiguring  men  inwardly, 
was  healing  disease  and  delivering  from  sin.  The  apostles  were 
not  only  eye-witnesses  of  His  majesty;  they  were  also  reposi- 
tories of  the  same  spirit  and  vitality  which  had  burst  forth  in 
glory  at  Mount  Hermon  and  come  forth  as  a  risen  body  from 
the  tomb;  and  they  were  ambassadors  from  this  same  court  of 
glory,  where  the  Son  of  man  sat,  the  unseen  Lord  of  their  wills, 
yet  with  them  always.  I  need  not  stay  now  to  note  how  this 
same  dynamic  of  life  enlarged  on  the  apostles'  hands ;  how  our 
straight-minded  energetic  apostle  St.  Peter  discovered  through 
a  vision,  in  which  among  all  the  creatures  of  God  he  discerned 
nothing  common  or  unclean,  and  through  actual  bestowal  of 
the  Spirit,  that  the  power  of  life  worked  as  well  with  heathen 
as  with  Jews,  and  that  "of  a  truth  .  .  .  God  is  no  respecter 
of  persons,  but  in  every  nation  he  that  feareth  him,  and 
worketh  righteousness,  is  accepted  with  him."  This  finished 
work,  this  accomplished  fact,  of  which  the  apostles  were  in 
charge,  and  which  was  proving  so  growing  and  vital,  was  also 
a  universal  fact;  it  belonged  to  man  as  man,  not  to  man  as 
Jew,  nor  merely  to  man  whose  heredity  had  prepared  him  for 
it  in  one  way.  It  was  limpid,  pervasive,  adaptable,  suited  to 


THE  ACCOMPLISHED  FACT  281 

any  inherited  range  of  ideas,  remedial  for  any  incurred  cor- 
ruptions or  errors  of  life;  this  it  showed  by  its  large  beneficent 
effects  on  Gentiles  and  Jews  alike.  So,  just  like  a  scientist  who 
has  discovered  a  new  appliance  for  healing  or  comfort  or  labor- 
saving,  and  who  desires  to  make  its  usefulness  as  widespread 
as  possible,  just  in  that  same  goodwill  spirit,  St.  Peter  and 
the  rest  are  concerned  to  spread  and  naturalize  the  workings 
of  this  new  life  among  men,  among  all  men. 

But  it  has  been  brought  to  light  and  power  through  the  his- 
tory of  one  nation,  and  through  one  man  who  has  proved  Him- 
self not  only  Son  of  man  but  king  of  that  nation,  who  on  the 
cross  where  He  laid  down  His  life  bore  the  inscription,  for  all 
the  world  to  see,  "Jesus,  the  King  of  the  Jews."  That  nation 
had  its  peculiar  body  of  traditions,  its  long  line  of  energies  and 
histories  and  laws  and  ceremonials  and  literature;  to  which 
Jesus  Himself  had  conformed  all  His  life,  and  which  was  in 
the  very  blood  and  bone  of  the  apostles.  As  our  Lord  Himself 
had  said,  salvation  is  of  the  Jews;  and  when  He  brought  heal- 
ing to  the  Syro-Phenician  woman,  it  was  under  the  recognized 
figure  of  sharing  the  children's  bread  with  dogs.  All  these  pe- 
culiar Jewish  ideas  must  now  be  brought  into  line  with  the 
great  new  fact;  all  was  one  tissue  and  consistency;  all  must 
be  brought  over  from  the  theory  and  imagery  in  which  hitherto 
it  had  existed,  from  the  ideals  of  life  which  for  so  many  cen- 
turies had  been  men's  culture  and  educative  power,  and  fas- 
tened on  this  colossal  fulfilment  and  culmination.  The  Hebrew 
nation  had  been,  as  it  were,  living  through  a  grand  allegory  of 
life,  in  which  customs,  and  temple- worship,  and  sacrifices,  and 
orders  of  priesthood,  and  prophetic  promises  had  all  embodied 
symbols  of  things  to  come;  like  a  minutely  articulated  body  of 
theory  and  poetic  image,  which  sometime  was  destined  to  melt 
into  the  actual  and  literal.  No  nation  ever  lived  on  earth  which 
was  so  truly  and  thoroughly  a  prophetic  nation;  its  whole  body 
of  inner  ideas  was  an  articulated  promise  and  symbol  of  things 
to  be. 

Accordingly,  the  very  first  thought  that  sprang  into  the 
apostles'  minds,  when  they  came  into  possession  of  the  accom- 


282  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

plished  fact,  was  the  thought  of  identification.  How  does  this 
fact  fit  in  with  the  facts  and  prophecies  which  we  already  have, 
which  our  history  has  bequeathed  to  us?  As  soon,  you  re- 
member, as  St.  Peter,  in  that  second  epistle,  avers  that  we  were 
eye-witnesses  of  His  majesty,  he  goes  on  to  say  we  have  also 
a  sure  word  of  prophecy,  sure  because  it  has  all  come  true,  and 
that  prophecy  came  through  the  same  Holy  Spirit  moving  the 
hearts  of  men  of  old,  and  that  prophecy  is  no  monopoly  of 
Jews,  is  not  of  private  interpretation,  as  if  any  people  or  age 
could  appropriate  it  and  rejoice  in  their  exclusiveness.  It  is 
capable  of  being  made  true  for  all;  its  lines  have  indeed  been 
wrought  out  in  one  nation,  but,  once  fulfilled  and  established, 
it  is  a  boon  universal. 

If  this  is  the  case,  we  would  naturally  expect  that  out  of 
the  plexus  and  tangle  of  Jewish  ideas,  clear  and  obvious 
enough  to  them  but  meaningless  to  the  great  body  of  the 
heathen,  the  promulgators  of  the  accomplished  fact  would 
bring  out  some  large  idea,  simple  and  plain  for  all  men  to  see 
and  appropriate.  For  the  Jews  this  truth  must  be  comprehen- 
sive enough  to  take  into  order  and  relation  all  the  system  of 
life  that  they  carry  in  mind;  but  for  Gentiles  and  Jews  to- 
gether, who  henceforth  must  have  the  keeping  of  it,  it  must 
emerge  into  a  large  rounded  statement,  which  will  be  just  as 
great  and  cogent,  and  satisfy  all  the  premises  of  the  case, 
though  these  premises  be  not  Jewish,  and  indeed  though 
heathen  come  to  it  out  of  darkness  and  with  no  formed  theories 
of  life  at  all.  What  statement  of  truth  shall  be  large  enough, 
simple  enough,  self-evidencing  enough,  to  satisfy  these  condi- 
tions; being  at  once  the  accurate  fulfilment  of  all  that  the  past 
has  symbolized  and  promised,  and  a  present  pulsation  and 
power  wholly  beyond  dependence  on  a  peculiar  past?  The 
answer  to  this  question,  along  with  their  simple  announcement 
of  good  news,  was  the  literary  problem  that  first  confronted 
the  apostles.  It  resolved  itself  into  the  question  how  all  this 
strange  new  truth  of  life  laid  hold  of  past  and  present,  fulfilling 
prophecy  and  at  the  same  time  giving  prophecy  its  final  dis- 
charge. 


THE  ACCOMPLISHED  FACT  283 

The  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews  contains  perhaps  the  most 
thorough  and  detailed  solution  of  this  part  of  the  apostles' 
problem,  the  stage  of  teaching  that  came  next  after  the  first 
plain  gospel  announcement.  It  is  full  of  scripture  quotation; 
it  takes  up  the  salient  points  of  prophecy  and  shows  how  truly 
and  broadly  these  are  fulfilled;  it  runs  over  the  Jewish  temple 
system  of  sacrifice  and  tithes  and  priesthood,  and  shows  how 
a  great  High  Priest  has  at  last  come  and  offered  such  a  sacri- 
fice that  no  bulls  and  goats  need  more  be  slain,  nor  altars 
erected,  nor  inaccessible  holy  places  be  veiled  off  from  men; 
for  He  has  entered  into  the  holy  place  once  for  all,  with  all 
our  difficulties  and  temptations  upon  Him,  bravely  and  sin- 
lessly  overcome,  with  righteousness  actually  earned  and  obedi- 
ence learned  through  suffering,  with  our  human  nature  com- 
pletely rounded  out  and  finished;  so  that  henceforth  there  is 
nothing  higher  to  look  and  languish  for,  but  now  our  anchor, 
our  hope  is  within  the  veil.  Then  there  is  that  longing  for  rest, 
which  all  the  Hebrew  wilderness  history  so  ingrained  in  them, 
and  which  their  exiles  and  tossings  about  among  the  nations 
through  all  their  turbulent  career  so  accentuated;  all  that  is 
satisfied  now,  after  so  many  days  had  been  set  for  it  and  passed 
without  fulfilment;  all  has  come  true  and  real  now;  we  which 
believe  do  enter  into  rest.  Then  there  is  that  prophecy  of  the 
essential  greatness  and  supremacy  of  man,  and  how  God  had 
put  all  things  under  his  feet;  that  too  has  come  true.  True, 
we  see  not  yet  all  things  put  under  him;  but  we  see  Jesus, 
made  in  the  same  way  and  loyal  to  the  same  nature;  and  we 
see  Him  for  the  suffering  of  death  crowned  with  glory  and 
honor.  There  is  where  manhood  is  now,  in  heaven,  sharing 
the  dominion  of  all  things  in  the  power  and  love  of  God. 

I  must  not  stay  to  trace  all  the  details  of  this  enthusiastic 
interpretation  of  things.  It  amounts,  I  think,  to  this:  that 
the  writer  is  laboring  to  show  how,  in  this  radiant  accomplished 
fact,  all  the  drag  and  burden  is  taken  off  from  life,  and  how 
now  the  soul  of  man,  in  full  sight  of  his  goal,  is  free  to  leap 
forward  into  larger  and  fuller  being.  His  redemption  is  fin- 
ished; his  sacrifice  accomplished  and  the  austere  altar-fires 


284  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

forever  put  out;  he  is  at  the  beginning  of  his  true  life,  with  the 
glorious  race  all  before  him;  all  that  remains  is  to  lay  aside 
weights  and  sins  and  spring  forward  unimpeded  and  free,  run- 
ning with  patient  staying-power  the  race  that  is  set  before  him, 
running  toward  Him  who  has  already  run  the  same  race  and 
is  waiting  to  welcome  him  to  the  throne  where  He  sits.  And 
here,  compassed  about  with  a  great  cloud  of  witnesses,  unseen 
perhaps  but  seeing  and  noting  all,  he  stands  in  the  morning  of 
the  times,  ready  to  run  and  overcome. 

Another  thing  is  noteworthy.  We  are  inveterately  accus- 
tomed to  look  toward  the  unseen  future  as  if  it  were  all  a 
dream,  a  doubt,  a  grand  perhaps;  there  is  a  painful  lack  of 
anything  that  we  can  commit  ourselves  to  as  real,  we  do  not 
take  things  for  granted.  The  whole  course  of  this  epistle  is 
from  dreams  to  realities;  the  unseen  home  to  which  all  these 
energies  and  promises  pointed  is  regarded  as  an  actual  present 
fact.  The  cloud  of  witnesses  out  of  all  the  ages  and  lands  are 
even  now  present,  compassing  us  about;  there  they  are,  so  to 
say,  just  beyond  the  violet  rays  of  our  spectrum,  but  still  in 
the  spiritual  actinic  rays,  watching  to  see  us  run  our  race  and 
play  our  part  well.  "For,"  as  St.  Paul  says,  "we  are  made  a 
spectacle,  a  theatre,  unto  the  world  and  to  angels,  and  to  men." 
That  being  man,  who  for  a  little  while  and  for  a  noble  purpose 
was  made  a  little  lower  than  the  angels,  has  learned  in  what 
company  and  to  what  end  it  is  given  him  to  play  this  earthly 
part.  There  is  no  more  any  austere  veil,  no  real  separation  of 
heaven  and  earth.  You  remember  who  those  witnesses  are. 
They  are  the  ones  described  in  the  eleventh  of  Hebrews,  the 
heroes  of  faith  in  all  ages,  who  in  their  time  had  the  substance 
of  things  hoped  for,  the  evidence  of  things  not  seen;  and  yet 
whose  life  was  simply  going  forward  to  do  the  next  thing, 
striving  in  dimness  but  never  in  doubt,  and  always  dying  with- 
out having  obtained  what  they  sought.  "They  which  say  such 
things,"  says  the  writer,  "declare  plainly  that  they  seek  a  coun- 
try," a  home  of  the  soul.  And  now  the  home  they  sought, 
which  even  after  their  death  remained  as  incomplete  to  them 
as  life  in  the  old  dispensation  of  things  was  to  us,  has  received 


THE  ACCOMPLISHED  FACT  285 

its  crowning  finish;  and  it  is  all  one  commonwealth,  the  whole 
family  in  heaven  and  earth  united  in  one  redemption.  The 
seen  and  the  unseen  departments  of  it  went  forward  together; 
and  the  better  thing  that  was  provided  for  us  was  "that  they 
without  us  should  not  be  made  perfect."  It  is  wrong  to  figure 
them  as  transferred  to  a  dreary  Sheol,  where  existence  is  only 
a  standstill  and  arrested  development;  equally  wrong  to  deem 
their  life  remote  from  and  uncoordinate  with  ours;  the  new 
order  of  things  has  made  such  crude  ideas  of  immortality  im- 
possible. The  self-same  redemption,  the  self-same  energies 
of  life,  the  self-same  order  of  the  spirit,  obtain  there  as  here, 
and  here  as  there;  nay,  and  because  our  citizenship  is  in 
heaven,  the  making  and  organizing  and  beautifying  of  heaven, 
the  wise  promotion  of  its  welfare  as  a  commonwealth,  is  as 
truly  in  our  hands  as  in  hands  unseen.  How  luminous  and 
reasonable  a  conception  this  has  become,  and  how  it  draws 
the  vast  universe  into  unity  and  order.  It  is  a  marvelous  pic- 
ture of  the  new  consciousness  that  came  to  find  place  in  men, 
after  they  had  got  a  glimpse  of  the  reality  of  things  in  the 
holy  mount,  and  had  seen  the  great  ones  of  old  actually  in 
consultation,  and  came  by  the  way  of  resurrection  and  the 
Pentecostal  spirit  to  realize  what  it  meant.  For  ye  are  not 
come  to  Mount  Sinai,  with  its  threats  and  its  lightnings  and 
its  paralyzing  influence  of  terror  and  dread;  but  ye  are  come 
to  Mount  Sion,  where  all  around  you,  present  and  aware,  are 
the  unnumerable  company  of  angels  and  men,  and  Jesus,  who 
has  wrought  to  found  and  finish  it  all,  and  the  spirits  of  just 
men  made  perfect.  For  by  all  these  agencies  and  histories  and 
experiences  of  the  undying  spirit,  whose  past  and  future  alike 
record  forever  the  vitality  of  faith,  God  hath  prepared  a  city, 
a  new  Jerusalem,  and  He  who  sits  on  the  throne  of  it  says, 
"Behold,  I  make  all  things  new." 

HI.      THE    MIND    OF     SAINT    JOHN 

All  this,  we  will  bear  in  mind,  is  how  this  new  dynamic  of 
humanity  looked  to  simple-minded  people;  who  if  they  saw 


286  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

things  with  elemental  vividness,  saw  them  as  straight  palpable 
fact,  and  without  the  warpings  and  glamours  of  a  preconceived 
philosophy;  this  was  their  frrst  deduction,  as  they  felt  the 
thrill  of  a  new  life,  and  identified  it  with  the  continuous  and 
pervasive  resurrection  power  of  their  Master.  It  was  in  the 
providence  of  the  Father  of  spirits  that  this  tremendous  thing 
should  be  submitted  first  to  the  keeping  of  sincere  and  virgin 
minds;  for  there  was  its  universal  home,  which  every  lowliest 
one  could  share  in,  and  there  was  the  clear  nucleus  of  concep- 
tion from  which,  as  time  and  experience  went  on,  should  pro- 
ceed all  the  applications  to  whatever  complexities  of  life. 
"Blessed  are  the  pure  in  heart,"  said  Jesus  —  the  word,  you 
know,  is  simple,  one-folded,  what  the  Germans  call  einjdltig 
— "for  they  shall  see  God";  they  it  is  whose  spirit  is  best  fitted 
to  identify  these  transcendent  elements  of  life  and  refer  them 
to  their  true  source;  they,  the  weak  things  of  the  earth,  can 
by  this  endowment  confound  the  mighty.  This  corresponds 
to  the  effort  of  our  Lord's  whole  ministry;  which  was  directed 
to  simplicity,  one  large  and  lucid  unity  of  spirit  controlling  the 
whole  being  of  man.  "One  thing  is  needful,"  he  once  said  to 
Martha,  not  the  many  things  that  distract  one  with  care  and 
worry,  but  the  one  totality  of  ideal,  the  good  part  which  Mary 
has  chosen  and  which  nothing  can  take  away.  The  realization 
of  this  came  from  His  early  Nazareth  years;  His  brother  and 
childhood  companion  James,  you  know,  when  he  in  turn  came 
to  teach  men  the  things  of  the  new  life,  warned  them  against 
being  double-minded.  And  the  whole  process  of  naturalizing 
the  accomplished  fact,  corresponding  to  this  initial  realization 
of  it,  was  a  simplifying  process.  It  struck  out  straight  for  the 
largest  and  most  comprehensive  facts  of  being,  in  which  all 
the  others  are  framed  and  environed:  the  varied  pageant  and 
arena  of  life,  the  unescapable  lot  of  death.  How  by  this  new 
thing  life  is  illumined,  enlarged,  enriched;  how  death  is  van- 
quished, disenvenomed,  abolished;  —such  is  the  spacious  and 
inclusive  effect  to  which  this  access  of  good  news,  this  success- 
ful venture,  reduces.  St.  Paul  got  it  accurately  right,  after 
all,  when  he  summed  it  up  in  the  words  which  so  many  times 


THE  ACCOMPLISHED  FACT  287 

come  into  our  theme:  "who  hath  abolished  death,  and  hath 
brought  life  and  immortality  to  light  through  the  gospel."  The 
light  of  life  is  here,  our  biometer  and  unit  of  measure;  all  that 
remains,  and  that  is  a  thing  for  world  and  eternity  to  compass, 
is  to  explore  and  assimilate  and  disseminate  it. 

It  is  interesting  to  note  in  what  sturdy,  concrete,  matter-of- 
fact  way  these  Galilean  apostles  set  about  accomplishing  this 
great  new  object  to  live  for.  One  and  all,  they  made  it  a 
matter  of  the  spirit,  that  initiative  in  man  whose  history  we 
have  traced  from  twilight  to  noonday;  but  the  spirit  they  recog- 
nized was  not  an  abstraction  or  a  theory,  but  a  present  Person 
and  Helper,  who  was  witnessing  with  their  spirits,  and  who  in 
every  juncture  was  taking  of  the  things  of  Christ  and  showing 
to  them,  showing  them  also  things  to  come.  Equally  also  in 
a  negative  way,  the  spirit  that  they  were  moved  to  resist  stood 
out  as  a  concrete  foe  to  fight.  The  writer  to  the  Hebrews,  you 
remember,  so  vividly  aware  of  the  long  Jewish  history,  in  which 
through  fear  of  death  men  were  all  their  lifetime  subject  to 
bondage,  makes  Christ's  great  act  in  taking  flesh  and  blood 
an  act  undertaken  "that  through  death  he  might  destroy  him 
that  had  the  power  of  death,  that  is,  the  devil."  If  the  power 
of  death  reduces  to  Satanism,  then  here  is  a  plain  element  of 
personality  on  which  to  concentrate  our  fightings  and  antipa- 
thies; we  have  found  the  vulnerable  point  in  the  very 
king  of  terrors.  No  obscured  issue  here;  no  diffusion  of  evil 
and  death  all  through  our  system;  we  know  in  what  spirit  and 
personality  the  power  of  death  resides,  and  can  direct  our 
forces  to  that  point.  So  likewise  St.  James,  writing  to  the 
early  communities  of  dispersed  Jewish  Christians,  says,  "Re- 
sist the  devil,  and  he  will  flee  from  you";  and  our  sturdy  St. 
Peter,  figuring  the  foe  as  a  roaring  lion  ranging  for  prey,  bids 
men  resist  him  stedfast  in  the  faith.  St.  John  makes  the 
matter  equally  definite:  the  Son  of  God,  he  says,  was  mani- 
fested that  He  might  destroy  the  works  of  the  devil;  and  St. 
Paul,  mindful  of  the  inner  subtleties  of  the  conflict,  warns  his 
readers  that  Satan  has  changed  his  tactics  and  has  trans- 
formed himself  into  an  angel  of  light.  I  am  not  sure  that  we 


288  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

have  gained  greatly  by  letting  our  notions  of  spiritual  issues 
grow  dim  and  abstract;  perhaps  for  this  very  reason  the  re- 
bellious, negative,  denying  spirit  that  is  so  prone  to  invade  the 
hearts  of  us  all  is  all  the  more  free  to  gain  a  foothold  and  give 
too  controlling  tone  to  our  life.  There  is  power  in  the  plain 
instinctive  resolve  to  define  evil  in  personal  terms,  and  hold 
him  as  an  alien  outside  our  personality.  When  Jesus  Himself 
begins  His  career  by  going  up  into  the  wilderness,  driven  by 
a  holy  spirit,  on  purpose  to  try  issues  with  the  devil,  and  when 
in  an  absolute  instinct  of  antipathy  He  says,  "The  prince  of 
this  world  cometh,  and  hath  nothing  in  me,"  we  feel  that  He 
is  fully  as  well  armed  against  spiritual  atrophy  and  death  as 
we,  in  our  vague  double-minded  speculations,  are  likely  to  be. 
There  is  real  advantage  in  bringing  the  large  issues  of  life  to  a 
point  where  not  only  our  mind,  but  as  it  were  our  senses,  can 
lay  hold  on  them.  It  is  the  impulse  of  simple-minded  men, 
like  these  early  disciples;  and  if  we  continue  straight-seeing 
we  do  not  outgrow  it.  You  remember  how  Tennyson  has  made 
this  very  concreteness  of  insight,  with  its  natural  connotation 
of  religious  forms,  the  basis  of  a  warning  addressed  to  those 
who  pride  themselves  on  a  more  abstract  and  philosophical 
faith. 

0  thou  that  after  toil  and  storm 

Mayst  seem  to  have  reach'd  a  purer  air, 
Whose  faith  has  centre  everywhere, 

Nor  cares  to  fix  itself  to  form. 

Leave  thou  thy  sister  when  she  prays, 

Her  early  Heaven,  her  happy  views; 

Nor  thou  with  shadow'd  hint  confuse 
A  life  that  leads  melodious  days. 

Her  faith  thro'  form  is  pure  as  thine, 

Her  hands  are  quicker  unto  good: 

Oh,  sacred  be  the  flesh  and  blood 
To  which  she  links  a  truth  divine! 

See  thou,  that  countest  reason  ripe 

In  holding  by  the  law  within, 

Thou  fail  not  in  a  world  of  sin, 
And  ev'n  for  want  of  such  a  type. 


THE  ACCOMPLISHED  FACT  289 

There  is  a  kind  of  common  sense  about  this  putting  of  our 
spiritual  struggles  and  achievements  into  common-day  terms 
and  forms  that  somehow  appeals  to  our  admiration;  it  makes 
our  deepest  life  an  affair  of  our  work  and  our  visible  world. 

I  am  taking  a  peculiar  way,  you  will  perhaps  urge,  in  set- 
ting out  to  describe  what  I  have  proposed,  the  mind  of  St.  John; 
but  perhaps  the  way  is  not  so  indirect,  after  all.  For  he  too 
is  in  this  same  trend  of  simplification;  his  preeminent  charac- 
teristic is,  that  he  goes  straight  to  the  supreme  issues  of  life 
and  death,  faith  and  conduct,  spirit  and  impulse,  without  in- 
tervening glamours  and  colorings;  defines  terms  in  their  ulti- 
mate values.  What  makes  his  views  of  life  so  deep  is  not  that 
they  are  less  simple  than  those  of  others,  but  that  they  are 
more  simple :  they  have  the  large,  boundless  simplicity  of  truth 
absolute.  But  they  are  set  squarely  in  the  higher  key  and 
idiom.  To  him  the  life  of  Christ  was  no  longer  the  life  of  a 
Galilean  artisan  whose  venture  of  love  and  faith  had  such  mar- 
velous results;  it  was  the  life  of  the  Son  of  God,  nay,  it  was 
the  Word  made  flesh  and  tabernacling  among  us;  and  what 
we  beheld  in  Him  was  the  glory  as  of  the  only-begotten  of  the 
Father,  full  of  grace  and  truth.  The  life  that  was  in  Him, 
therefore,  was  the  life  absolute,  pulsating  with  one  vitality  both 
divine  and  human;  and  that  life  is  the  light  of  men,  illumi- 
nating and  irradiating  all  the  spirit  and  power  that  belongs 
essentially  to  human  life.  If  we  would  see  what  God  would 
be  like,  as  expressed  in  terms  of  flesh  and  blood,  here  it  actu- 
ally is,  moving  among  men  for  them  to  see  and  hear  and  handle, 
appealing  to  men  for  their  belief  and  worship  and  obedience. 
We  beheld  His  glory;  the  ideal  has  become  real;  the  God 
whose  supreme  unpronounceable  name  is  reality,  He  who  is, 
has  spelled  His  name  in  the  letters  of  human  life,  has  expressed 
His  nature  in  the  terms  of  human  deeds,  and  now  we  have 
but  to  look  at  it  and  see  if  it  is  not  so.  The  interest  that  we 
take  in  such  an  Object  is  not  the  interest  of  past  history,  with 
its  details  of  time  and  place;  not  primarily  the  interest  of  wise 
teachings  and  precepts  of  conduct;  it  is  the  interest  of  coming 
face  to  face  with  the  divine,  and  therefore  of  coming  to  the 


290  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

very  centre  and  spirit  of  our  own  true  life.  "These  are 
written,"  he  says  of  the  signs  of  his  gospel,  "that  ye  might  be- 
lieve that  Jesus  is  the  Christ,  the  Son  of  God;  and  that  be- 
lieving ye  might  have  life  through  his  name."  All  this,  you 
see,  deep  as  it  is,  is  just  the  far-reaching  depth  that  inheres 
in  a  luminous  transcendent  fact,  recognized  as  the  greatest  fact 
that  can  smite  itself  into  the  life  and  history  of  men.  It  dis- 
engages the  fact,  so  to  say,  from  its  accidents  of  time  and  place 
and  nation  and  custom ;  and  instead  of  putting  details  together 
and  reasoning  upon  them  and  like  the  centurion  deducing, 
"Truly  this  was  the  Son  of  God,"  it  treats  the  deduction  as 
already  made;  or  rather,  it  takes  the  fact  as  so  obvious,  so 
accordant  with  our  highest  ideals,  that  it  does  not  need  to  be 
submitted  to  logic  and  reasoning  at  all,  it  is  its  own  evidence, 
and  needs  only  to  be  seen.  Here  is  more  than  a  historical  fact, 
more  than  a  body  of  teaching,  more  than  a  ministry  of  signs 
and  wonders;  here  is  the  life  absolute,  the  Life  Indeed.  In  a 
word,  the  mind  of  St.  John,  as  revealed  through  his  gospel  and 
epistles,  is  an  intuitive  mind,  which  sees  the  truth  of  things 
at  first  hand,  and  needs  no  crutches  of  logic  or  philosophy  to 
evidence  it  or  support  it;  a  mind  which  ignores  preliminary 
processes  of  getting  at  truth,  and  fastens  at  once  on  the  abso- 
lute conclusion  of  the  whole  matter.  So  its  view  of  the  accom- 
plished fact  is  not  a  deduction  from  visible  premises;  rather  it 
is  like  a  large  and  self-evidencing  vision. 

Such  a  mind  employs  its  own  vocabulary,  corresponding  to 
its  own  peculiar  scale  and  range  of  conceptions.  To  under- 
stand it,  and  to  share  our  ideas  with  St.  John's,  we  must  move, 
so  to  say,  in  his  atmosphere,  must  realize  the  scenery  of  his 
super-earthly,  absolute  world.  It  is  like  conforming  our 
imagination  to  the  ideas  of  a  poet,  in  order  to  get  the  values 
of  his  poetry. 

Wer  den  Dichter  will  verstehen 
Muss  in  Dichters  Lande  gehen, 

is  Goethe's  way  of  expressing  it, 

Who  the  poet  will  understand, 
He  must  go  to  the  poet's  land. 


THE  ACCOMPLISHED  FACT  291 

But  when  we  get  there,  and  when  we  think  ourselves  into  the 
world  of  St.  John,  we  find  his  ideas  homogeneous,  correlated 
and  coordinated  with  each  other,  and  accurately  adjusted  to 
his  large  conception  of  things.  He  moves  in  his  world  as 
simply  and  naturally  as  we  in  ours.  That  the  things  of  Christ 
look  differently  to  him  from  the  other  gospel  writers,  and  that 
he  has  recalled  other  and  deeper  strains  of  Christ's  teaching, 
is  perfectly  consistent  with  the  fact  which  Jesus  said  would 
accompany  the  coming  of  the  Spirit,  namely  that  the  Spirit 
would  take  the  things  of  Christ  and  show  them  to  men,  bringing 
all  things  to  their  remembrance ;  the  difference  is,  that  St.  John 
apprehends  the  central  spirit  of  Christ's  being  more  intimately, 
more  at  first  hand,  more  according  to  the  sacred  ideal  which, 
being  the  holiest  and  secretest  thing  in  Jesus'  life,  would  nat- 
urally be  divulged  only  to  the  most  sympathetic  insight.  So 
his  memory  and  interpretation  of  things  is  more  penetrative; 
he  reports  what  he  has  had  the  inner  ear  to  hear  and  the  closer 
intimacy  to  gather.  Thus  it  is  that  the  Bible  places  him  be- 
fore us;  he  was  the  disciple  whom  Jesus  loved.  And  the  things 
he  draws  from  the  treasury  of  Christ  are  all  in  keeping  with 
this  conception  of  him;  not  a  line  out  of  character  or  out  of 
perspective.  The  poetic  justice  of  the  case  is  complete.  The 
mind  of  St.  John,  you  know,  is  the  battle-ground  of  the  myopic, 
unpoetic,  unspiritual  critics;  they  deem  that  such  a  way  of 
portraying  the  Life  Indeed  must  have  taken  about  two  centuries 
to  evolve,  and  that  men  could  not  come  to  think  so  until  they 
had  poked  their  prosaic  noses  into  gnostic  books  and  Neo- 
Platonic  books  and  the  speculations  of  Philo  and  the  maun- 
derings  of  pedants  and  book-worms.  It  is  a  curious  example  of 
how  each  man  imputes  himself;  that  is  the  only  way  they  can 
conceive  of  getting  at  the  involvements  of  a  transcendent  truth, 
because  it  is  their  way.  But  this  report  of  Jesus  does  not  look 
like  the  sort  of  thing  that  you  get  out  of  parchment  and  phi- 
losophy; it  is  too  vitally  inwoven  with  the  inmost  fibre  of 
Christ's  life  for  that.  The  scripture  account  of  the  case  is 
more  natural,  more  in  the  line  of  least  resistance,  when  it  says, 
"This  is  the  disciple  which  testifieth  of  these  things,  and  wrote 


292  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

these  things:  and  we  know  that  his  testimony  is  true."  And  if 
it  be  objected  that  such  deep  views  of  life  are  beyond  the  scope 
of  a  fisherman  from  Galilee,  —  well,  the  deepest  soundings  of 
human  nature  that  literature  has  given  us  were  not  beyond 
the  plummet  of  a  youth  from  Stratford-on-Avon,  whose  words 
for  three  centuries  have  remained  the  standing  enigma  of  the 
prosaists  who  would  account  for  them;  and  have  we  less  data 
to  work  on  here,  in  a  pure-hearted  young  man  who  at  the 
very  beginning  of  Jesus'  ministry  was  asking  "Rabbi,  where 
dwellest  thou?"  who  was  with  Him  in  the  holy  mount  and  the 
mysterious  garden,  who  leaned  on  His  breast  at  supper,  and 
who  never  denied  or  deserted  Him  in  His  uttermost  extremity? 
Put  such  a  man,  no  matter  if  he  hasn't  a  university  degree,  a 
man  imbued  with  his  nation's  purest  ideas,  a  man  of  immedi- 
ately apprehensive,  penetrative,  intuitive  mind,  a  man  of 
Boanerges'  temperament  ready  to  call  down  fire  from  heaven 
on  any  spirit  that  would  not  yield  instant  faith  and  allegiance, 
put  such  a  man  before  the  majestic  pageant  of  life  that  was 
unfolding  itself  there  in  Palestine,  the  greatest  venture  of  the 
manhood  spirit  that  ever  was  enacted;  and  would  it  take  him 
two  centuries  to  apprehend  what  it  meant?  Whenever  these 
words  of  John  were  written,  we  have  them  to  reckon  with  and 
account  for.  Are  they  likelier  to  have  come  by  the  slow,  grop- 
ing, deductive  way,  the  way  of  the  library  and  parchment  and 
the  dust  of  subterranean  scholarship,  or  by  the  way  that  Scrip- 
ture itself  grounds  and  avers,  the  flash  of  rapturous  discovery 
and  intuition?  It  is  not  a  mere  question  of  how  and  when  all 
this  got  into  the  canon;  that  is  the  least  significant  part  of  it. 
It  is  rather  the  question  of  eyes  to  see  and  a  mind  to  appre- 
hend and  interpret.  And  I  find  the  matter  no  more  difficult, 
as  attributed  to  the  son  of  Zebedee,  fisherman  though  he  was, 
than  is  an  analogous  fact,  as  attributed  in  modern  times  to 
the  son  of  a  wool-dealer  John  Shakespeare;  and  the  way  seems 
far  clearer  than  the  way  which  pushes  it  two  centuries  away, 
into  the  dullest  period  of  our  annals.  It  shows  us  the  Life  In- 
deed working  an  immediate,  not  postponed  effect;  or  postponed 
at  least  only  until  the  ripened  mind  of  the  aged  St.  John  could 


THE  ACCOMPLISHED  FACT  293 

assemble  its  recollections,  and  coordinate  them,  and  weave 
them  in  with  their  transcendent  meanings.  That  is  the  way 
the  Scripture  represents  it:  John's  gospel,  the  latest  written, 
coming  in  to  supplement  men's  too  narrow  views  and  correct 
their  myopic  errors.  You  remember  how  Browning,  in  his 
poetic  portrayal  of  St.  John's  death-bed,  puts  into  words  his 
account  of  the  case:  St.  John  is  represented  as  speaking  of  the 
storm  of  doubts  and  objections  that  raged  round  his  old  age, 
clamoring  for  explanation  and  craving  for  new  and  more  cogent 
grounds  for  faith. 

I  never  thought  to  call  down  fire  on  such, 

Or,  as  in  wonderful  and  early  days, 

Pick  up  the  scorpion,  tread  the  serpent  dumb; 

But  patient  stated  much  of  the  Lord's  life 

Forgotten  or  misdelivered,  and  let  it  work: 

Since  much  that  at  the  first,  in  deed  and  word, 

Lay    simply    and    sufficiently    exposed, 

Had  grown  (or  else  my  soul  was  grown  to  match, 

Fed  through  such  years,  familiar  with  such  light, 

Guarded  and  guided  still  to  see  and  speak) 

Of   new   significance   and   fresh    result; 

What  first  were  guessed  as  points,  I  now  knew  stars, 

And  named  them  in  the  Gospel  I  have  writ. 

It  is  an  old  man's  recollections,  but  also  an  old  man's  long- 
seasoned  insight  and  wisdom;  not  only  the  memory,  ranging 
over  the  three  wonderful  years  of  its  richest  field,  but  the  clear- 
seeing,  meditative,  intuitive  mind  of  St.  John. 

All  of  St.  John's  words  correspond  accurately  to  this  cast  of 
mind.  The  most  salient  characteristic  of  them  is  the  note  of 
absoluteness  that  pervades  them;  they  deal  with  truth  abso- 
lute, they  speak  in  its  idiom.  To  him  the  reality  that  has  come 
in  to  fill  the  world  of  manhood  is  not  the  promise  of  salvation, 
or  prophecy  of  an  eventual  life  eternal,  but  just  life,  without 
modification  or  limitation,  life  absolute  and  full-orbed,  pul- 
sating through  worlds  seen  and  unseen  alike.  "I  am  the  life," 
he  makes  Christ  say,  not  am  working  to  secure  it;  and  accord- 
ing to  this  conception  he  defines  life:  "This  is  life  eternal,"  he 
reports  Jesus  as  saying  to  the  Father,  "that  they  might  know 
thee  the  only  true  God,  and  Jesus  Christ,  whom  thou  hast  sent." 


294  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

All  the  elements  of  man's  existence  and  duty  he  states  not  in 
terms  of  process  or  struggle  or  slow  cure  of  sin  or  gradual 
growth,  but  as  it  were  in  terms  of  completed  evolution.  The 
world  he  habitually  moves  in  is  the  world  risen  with  the  per- 
fected life  of  Christ.  He  it  is,  you  know,  who  reports  the  con- 
versation with  Nicodemus,  wherein  is  revealed  the  necessity 
and  nature  of  the  second  birth;  from  him  it  is  that  we  have  the 
conversation  with  the  woman  of  Samaria,  wherein  man's  wor- 
ship of  God  is  defined  as  the  spontaneous  impulse  of  spirit  and 
truth,  and  man's  true  power  in  the  world  as  like  that  of  a 
well  of  water,  pouring  forth  cheer,  and  refreshing,  and  spring- 
ing up  into  everlasting  life;  from  him  the  pregnant  words 
about  making  the  will  of  God  our  meat  and  drink,  and  know- 
ing of  the  doctrine  by  willing  what  God  wills,  and  obtaining 
freedom  of  spirit  by  knowing  the  truth.  He  it  is  who  pre- 
serves to  us  Jesus'  supreme  declaration  of  His  purpose  in 
coming  into  the  world,  that  He  might  be  king  of  men  by  bear- 
ing witness  to  the  truth;  and  he  it  is  who  records  those  wonder- 
ful words  of  counsel  and  explanation  and  prayer  by  which  on 
that  last  sad  evening  He  would  adjust  their  souls  to  the  coming 
crisis,  leaving  with  them  His  joy  and  peace,  that  their  joy 
might  be  full.  All  belongs  to  the  homogeneous  idiom,  the  de- 
tailed exploration,  as  it  were,  of  manhood  life  as  an  absolute 
rounded  thing,  a  solved  problem,  beyond  the  invasion  of  bond- 
age and  error  and  sin.  It  is  what  life  is,  adult  and  fully 
evolved;  we  could  not  conceive  it  higher  or  essentially  other, 
though  it  were  transferred  to  heaven.  Here  is  the  Life  Indeed, 
which  through  so  many  centuries  of  dimness  and  struggle  and 
growth  has  been  advancing  to  fulness  and  rounded  truth  of 
being. 

Now  we  must  not  omit  to  note,  as  we  pass  along,  to  what 
simplicity  of  terms,  after  all,  these  tremendous  ideas  are  re- 
duced. This  is  not  the  abstract  interpretation  of  a  gnostic 
theologian  but  the  forthright  conception  of  a  sincere  Galilean, 
telling  us  of  another  Galilean's  life  and  innermost  ideas.  The 
very  figures  he  uses  are  startling,  sometimes  almost  repulsive, 
in  their  plainness.  St.  John  it  is,  you  remember,  who  preserves 


THE  ACCOMPLISHED  FACT  295 

to  us  that  cannibal  conception  of  eating  the  flesh  and  drinking 
the  blood  of  the  Son  of  man;  no  philosopher  in  the  world,  we 
may  roundly  say,  would  ever  have  put  it  so;  and  yet  how 
effectually  is  thus  revealed  what  it  means  to  get  the  power  of 
the  new  life  thoroughly  incorporate  with  our  blood  and  breath. 
He  it  is  who  identifies  the  most  inner  values  of  life  with  the 
simplest  acts  and  experiences:  reducing  it  to  terms  of  eating 
bread,  and  drinking  water,  and  walking  in  daylight,  and  bear- 
ing fruit  like  branches  of  a  vine,  and  following,  like  sheep,  the 
voice  of  a  Shepherd,  and  entering  into  a  door  and  finding  pas- 
ture. With  all  these  everyday  figures,  too,  St.  John's  vocabu- 
lary is  throughout  large  and  elemental:  the  terms  light,  life, 
love,  truth,  world-filling  conceptions,  are  the  controlling  terms 
of  his  portrayal  of  things;  he  uses  them  with  all  the  easy  as- 
surance and  consistency  with  which  we  use  the  technical  terms 
of  a  science  or  a  philosophy.  "This  then  is  the  message,"  he 
announces  as  the  starting-point  of  what  he  would  maintain  in 
his  First  Epistle,  "which  we  have  heard  of  him,  and  declare 
unto  you,  that  God  is  light,  and  in  him  is  no  darkness  at  all." 
It  is  as  if  he  would  describe  the  creation  of  a  new  world,  with 
its  initial  decree  "Let  there  be  light,"  like  the  primal  decree  of 
old,  except  that  the  light  and  He  who  commands  it  are  identi- 
fied as  one;  and  as  if  henceforth  all  the  new  creation  were 
resolved  into  the  question  of  walking  and  growing  and  bearing 
fruit  in  the  kindly  power  of  the  light.  "He  that  loveth  his 
brother,"  the  epistle  goes  on  to  say,  "abideth  in  the  light,  and 
there  is  none  occasion  of  stumbling  in  him.  But  he  that  hateth 
his  brother  is  in  darkness,  and  walketh  in  darkness,  and 
knoweth  not  whither  he  goeth,  because  that  darkness  hath 
blinded  his  eyes."  A  simple  elemental  matter  this;  as  ele- 
mental as  instinct  and  the  rudimentary  life  of  nature.  Then 
again,  declaring  that  "God  is  love,"  he  makes  a  practical  iden- 
tification too  bold  and  direct  for  a  philosopher  to  dare,  that 
"he  that  dwelleth  in  love  dwelleth  in  God,  and  God  in  him." 
It  is  the  one  bold,  assured,  luminous  step  from  premise  to  con- 
clusion: dwell  in  love,  let  that  be  your  central  vitality,  con- 
trolling all  your  relations  near  and  distant,  filling  your  world 


296  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

full,  as  it  is  in  you  to  apprehend  your  world,  and  the  problem 
of  your  living  is  solved.  That  is  a  matter  not  of  logic  and 
deduction,  not  of  philosophy  and  speculation,  not  of  the  mere 
intellect,  but  of  the  spirit  and  the  elemental  being;  it  lays  hold 
of  our  sympathies  and  antipathies,  as  these  have  been  tem- 
pered and  educated  by  love  and  a  divinely  directed  life.  The 
tests  which  he  applies  to  life,  and  if  you  will  look  at  his  first 
epistle  you  will  find  it  full  of  such  tests  reduced  to  plainest 
issues,  are  one  and  all  tests  of  the  spirit.  "Beloved,"  he  says, 
"believe  not  every  spirit,  but  try  the  spirits  whether  they  are 
of  God."  Though  so  frankly  intuitive,  his  mind  is  not  ram- 
bling and  blindly  adventurous;  he  it  was,  you  remember,  who 
in  the  earlier  days  of  his  unregulated  impulse,  when  he  was 
ready  to  denounce  incontinently  any  who  did  not  see  just  as 
he  did,  incurred  from  Jesus  Himself  the  reproof,  "Ye  know 
not  what  spirit  ye  are  of."  But  the  sojourn  in  the  intimate 
presence  of  the  Life  Indeed,  and  the  long  succeeding  years  of 
meditation  and  inner  growth,  had  made  his  tests  luminous  and 
sure;  like  the  man  born  blind,  whose  recovery  he  records,  he 
could  say,  "One  thing  I  know,  that  whereas  I  was  blind,  now  I 
see."  This  insight,  which  is  just  one  phase  of  a  larger  life- 
filling  energy,  carries  with  it  also  the  same  absolute,  antipa- 
thetic, supremely  victorious  power  of  dealing  with  the 
sinfulness  of  human  nature;  it  is  to  him  like  the  spiritual 
prepossession  that  shuts  all  of  us  absolutely  out  of  the  lower 
temptations  and  crimes;  sin  is  as  alien  to  all  the  pulsations  of 
his  being  as  arson  or  highway  robbery  is  to  us;  "whosoever  is 
born  of  God,"  he  says,  —  not  opens  a  new  account  wherein  as 
soon  as  sin  is  committed  it  is  forgiven,  but  — "doth  not  commit 
sin"  at  all.  "We  know,"  he  says  again,  "that  whosoever  is 
born  of  God  sinneth  not;  but  he  that  is  begotten  of  God 
keepeth  himself,  and  that  wicked  one  toucheth  him  not."  In 
a  word,  he  is  defining  life,  in  all  its  powers  and  crises,  accord- 
ing to  the  new  idiom;  there  is  a  kind  of  reversal  of  our  every- 
day view  whereby,  according  to  his  intuitive  insight,  he  is 
describing  things  as  they  look,  and  as  they  essentially  are,  as 
approached  from  the  divine  side  of  the  veil.  In  such  spiritual 


THE  ACCOMPLISHED  FACT  297 

scenery  it  is,  he  virtually  says,  that  we,  to  whom  is  given  power 
to  become  sons  of  God,  are  empowered  to  move  and  have  our 
being.  And  the  education  we  get  here  is  of  the  same  absolute 
strain;  it  is  just  progressive  insight,  coexisting  with  progressive 
purity  and  strength,  as  we  advance  toward  the  supreme  goal 
which,  being  unseen,  is  still  unknown  except  in  its  essential 
power.  St.  John  it  is,  you  remember,  who  gives  what  is  after 
all  the  most  simple,  and  yet  the  most  searching  test  of  the 
life  to  come:  "Beloved,  now  are  we  the  sons  of  God,  and  it 
doth  not  yet  appear  what  we  shall  be;  but  we  know  that,  when 
he  shall  appear,  we  shall  be  like  him;  for  we  shall  see  him  as 
he  is."  Eyes  to  see,  coordinate  with  beings  to  assimilate  and 
appropriate  the  highest  manifestation  of  life;  that  is  the  sum 
and  crown  of  it. 

If  we  were  studying  St.  John's  mind  psychologically,  we 
should  say  there  is  a  prevailing  note  of  the  feminine  in  it:  it 
goes  straight  to  the  heart  and  root  of  the  matter;  it  needs  no 
crutches  of  logic  and  groping  premise  because  it  instinctively 
feels  what  is  truth,  approaches  the  ultimate  meanings  of  things 
by  the  tactile  sympathy  of  insight  and  vision.  To  such  a  mind 
the  dull  processes  of  proof,  and  equally  the  warping  and  im- 
peding motions  of  sin  and  evil,  are  practically  eliminated:  the 
divine-human  manhood,  for  us  as  for  Christ,  just  is,  and  that 
is  all  there  is  to  note;  it  is,  and  we  are,  and  here  is  the  iden- 
tity, put  here  on  earth,  and  moving  toward  its  unseen  goal  of 
insight  and  realization.  From  such  intuitive  strain  of  mind 
it  is  that  we  most  truly  derive  our  best  impulses  to  growth  and 
pure  progress ;  it  is  the  alluring  and  assuring  power  of  our  new 
world.  This  it  is  that  Goethe  has  in  mind  in  that  famous  sum- 
mary of  his,  at  the  end  of  his  greatest  poem: 

Alles  Vergangliche 
1st    nur    ein    Gleichnis; 
Das  Unzulangliche, 
Hier  wird's  Ereignis; 
Das  Unbeschreibliche, 
Hier  ist's  getan; 
Das  Ewig-Weibliche 
Zieht  uns  hinan. 


298  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

This  too  is  written,  like  St.  John's  words,  as  if  things  were 
seen  from  the  holy  mount,  the  other  side  of  the  veil:  Every- 
thing transitory  is  only  a  parable;  the  inadequate,  here  it  be- 
comes actual  event;  the  undescribable,  ineffable,  here  it  is 
done;  the  eternal  womanly,  which  loves  and  feels  and  sees  at 
first  hand,  —  this  influence  it  is  which  allures,  draws  us  on- 
ward, to  light  and  life.  It  is  not  by  logic  that  we  are  saved,  or 
philosophy,  these  are  but  the  support  that  life  must  devise  for 
our  dim  groping  intellect;  not  by  mere  fightings  with  evil  ten- 
dency and  obedience  to  law  and  earning  reward  or  escaping 
punishment;  these  are  but  relics  of  an  older  and  childish  dis- 
pensation; it  is  by  walking  in  the  noonday  light  of  life,  walk- 
ing forward  and  upward  in  the  eternally  feminine  might  of 
straight  insight,  and  faith,  and  love. 

Now  it  is  of  crowning  interest  to  note  how  such  an  absolute, 
intuitive  mind  as  this  of  St.  John's  will  confront  the  universal 
fact  of  death.  To  this,  after  all,  this  event  which  to  Old  Tes- 
tament saints  was  the  king  of  terrors  and  which  to  New  Tes- 
tament saints,  exultant  as  they  are,  is  still  the  last  enemy  to 
be  destroyed,  —  to  this  we  must  come,  and  adjust  our  new  view 
of  things  to  it.  And  I  think  it  is  mainly  to  clear  up  this  enigma 
that  St.  John  has  added  to  former  accounts  his  record  of  the 
raising  of  Lazarus.  Tennyson  has  blamed  him  for  not  com- 
pleting the  story  and  telling  what  Lazarus  saw  beyond  the 
tomb  during  that  four  days'  sojourn;  it  would  so  reassure  us, 
he  says,  by  telling  what  it  is  to  die. 

Behold  a  man  rais'd  up  by  Christ! 

The  rest  remaineth  tmreveal'd; 

He   told    it   not;    or   something   seal'd 
The  lips  of  that  Evangelist. 

Why,  this  is  just  what  the  story  does  tell  us;  or  rather  it  tells 
us  what  it  really  is  to  rise  from  death,  and  this  is  so  much 
greater,  so  much  more  truly  in  the  uninterrupted  current  of 
life,  that  death  actually  disappears,  is  abolished.  To  rise  from 
death  is  not  to  be  resuscitated,  as  Lazarus  was,  with  all  the 
old  organism  and  powers  intact,  ready  to  sit  down  again  at 


THE  ACCOMPLISHED  FACT  299 

table,  and  take  up  again  the  old  relations,  and  have  all  the 
process  of  existing  and  dying  to  go  through  again;  if  this  were 
all  there  is  in  resurrection,  as  Browning  has  described  in  his 
poem  of  Karshish,  it  would  simply  leave  Lazarus  bewildered 
with  a  double  consciousness,  trying  to  adjust  the  reestablished 
currents  of  the  old  world  with  the  prematurely  realized  glories 
of  the  new.  Nor  is  resurrection  simply  waking  up  at  some 
future  indefinite  time,  when  the  list  of  candidates  is  so  fully 
made  up  that  all  can  enter  upon  the  restored  life  together. 
Martha  already  had  this  hope  for  her  dead  brother.  "I  know," 
she  said,  "that  he  shall  rise  again  in  the  resurrection  at  the 
last  day."  And  the  tremendous  answer  that  Jesus  gave,  the 
answer  that  is  repeated  at  all  our  burial  services,  corrected  this 
crude  notion  by  saying,  not  that  men  who  lived  the  new  life 
of  faith  should  rise  again,  but  that  they  should  not  die  at  all: 
"I  am  the  resurrection  and  the  life:  he  that  believeth  in  me, 
though  he  were  dead  yet  shall  he  live;  and  whosoever  liveth 
and  believeth  in  me  shall  never  die."  Here  is  the  supreme 
absolute  of  John  and  Jesus;  as  the  crown  and  culmination  of 
the  long  history  we  have  traced,  death  is  regarded  as  actually 
and  literally  abolished.  "Said  I  not  unto  thee,"  Jesus  answers 
to  Martha's  last  shrinking  objection,  "that  if  thou  wouldest 
believe,  thou  shouldest  see  the  glory  of  God?"  Here  it  is; 
but  its  inner  guise  is  not  what  Martha  deemed;  it  had  to  come 
to  such  minds  as  hers,  perhaps,  by  a  negative,  by  a  crude  mir- 
acle of  resuscitation  showing  first  what  the  grand  uprise  of  life 
is  not;  and  so  perhaps  it  has  to  prove  itself  to  most  of  us, 
tangled  up  as  we  are  in  the  life  of  the  senses  and  in  the  sur- 
face shows  of  things;  but  to  an  intuitive  mind  like  St.  John's, 
which  devoted  a  lifetime  of  meditation  to  its  large  meanings, 
this  glory  of  God,  this  ideal  made  real,  brought  to  remem- 
brance the  central  mind  of  Christ,  and  death  was  seen  not  as 
circumvented  or  evaded  but  essentially  abolished.  O  friends: 
have  we  not  been  naming  the  wrong  thing  death?  We  have 
given  the  name  not  to  the  thing  itself  but  to  the  symbol,  to 
that  physical  event  which  with  all  things  transitory  is  only  a 
parable.  And  our  fears  and  doubts  have  clustered  about  the 


300  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

symbol ;  to  this  we  have  closed  our  eyes  in  dread,  or  endeavored 
to  meet  it  in  stoicism  and  bravado,  while  the  thing  itself,  which 
is  our  own  selfish  refusal  of  the  spirit  of  life,  has  been  to  us 
a  thing  unreal,  with  which  we  have  played,  or  which  we  have 
doubted,  as  if  it  were  only  a  non-existent  fancy.  And  when  we 
see  and  deal  with  the  thing  itself,  vanquishing  it  by  our  faith 
and  will,  as  vitalized  by  the  spirit  of  Christ,  we  find  that  im- 
mortality is  a  present  fact,  that  mortality  is  swallowed  up  of 
life.  Such  is  the  culmination  that  the  working  consciousness 
of  St.  John,  the  intuitive  mind  that  sees  the  end  and  knows  the 
good,  has  labored,  from  the  youth  of  his  wonderful  vision  to 
the  ripened  wisdom  and  insight  of  old  age,  to  make  plain  to  us. 


IV.      THE    MIND    OF     SAINT    PAUL 

The  mind  of  St.  John,  scholars  tell  us,  is  the  mind  of  a 
mystic;  an  accurate  enough  designation,  though  I  have  not 
used  the  word  hitherto,  preferring  rather  to  speak  in  terms  of 
what  the  word  means,  the  thing  itself.  Men  have  an  invet- 
erate habit  of  giving  a  thing  a  name,  and  thereby  putting  it 
as  it  were  into  a  pigeon-hole,  out  of  the  sight  and  present  grip 
of  life,  where  it  is  available  only  as  casual  occasion  rises  for 
reference.  To  call  a  man  a  mystic  is  virtually  to  remove  him 
from  our  everyday  and  prosaic  world  into  a  region  where  sup- 
posedly the  landscape  is  just  the  scenery  of  the  beatific  vision, 
with  which  only  exceptional  natures  can  be  familiar,  and  they 
only  by  transporting  themselves  through  imaginative  contem- 
plation into  something  ecstatic,  unworldly,  unreal.  Thus  we 
conveniently  take  such  a  man  out  of  our  milieu  of  concrete 
experience  and  stow  him  away  in  his  pigeon-hole.  But  when 
we  come  to  think  of  it,  our  real  life,  the  central  individuality 
which  we  can  share  with  no  other  person,  reduces  itself  not  to 
external  facts  but  to  inner  meanings.  No  two  of  us  are  just 
alike;  no  two  of  us  have  worlds  just  alike.  There  is  relatively 
more  of  the  mystic  in  some  of  us,  relatively  less  in  others;  the 
minds  of  some  of  us  approximate  to  that  of  St.  John,  to  a 


THE  ACCOMPLISHED  FACT  301 

mind  that  sees  splendors  and  profundities  where  others  see 
only  what  the  retina  can  picture.  We  never  can  tell  what  life 
is  to  our  neighbor;  his  inner  seeing  self  is  to  us  a  sealed  book, 
which  can  never  be  opened  until  we  know  as  also  we  are  known. 
Life,  for  every  one  of  us,  is  what  our  inmost  personality  makes 
it.  You  remember  how  Stevenson  has  set  forth  this  truth  in 
his  immensely  suggestive  essay,  "The  Lantern  Bearers";  in 
which,  among  others,  he  peers  into  the  mind  of  a  miser,  with 
the  dreams  and  ambitions  and  delights  that  cluster  round  his 
crazy  clutch  for  gold.  "And  so  with  others,"  he  says,  "who 
do  not  live  by  bread  alone,  but  by  some  cherished  and  perhaps 
fantastic  pleasure;  who  are  meat  salesmen  to  the  external  eye, 
and  possibly  to  themselves  are  Shakespeares,  Napoleons,  or 
Beethovens;  who  have  not  one  virtue  to  rub  against  another 
in  the  field  of  acitve  life,  and  yet  perhaps,  in  the  life  of  con- 
templation, sit  with  the  saints.  We  see  them  on  the  street,  and 
we  can  count  their  buttons;  but  heaven  knows  in  what  they 
pride  themselves!  heaven  knows  where  they  have  set  their 
treasure!"  So  it  is.  The  soul  of  man  is  a  seething  alembic 
of  vital  and  creative  forces;  a  living  potency  of  poetry  and 
vision  and  heaven.  How  many  of  us,  do  you  suppose, 
may  essentially  be  mystics,  eating,  drinking,  toiling,  planning, 
as  we  all  have  to  do  here  on  earth,  and  yet  all  the  while 
walking  as  it  were  on  air,  in  a  sphere  beyond  the  invasion  of 
sense? 

We  call  St.  John  a  mystic;  and  when  we  come  to  square  the 
term  with  what  he  says  and  does  we  find  simply  that  he  dwells, 
so  to  say,  at  one  pole  of  our  common  life,  the  pole  where  ideals 
have  weathered  the  impeding  austerities  of  struggle  and  logic 
and  become  realities.  His  mysticism  does  not  connote  some- 
thing dreamy  and  ecstatic;  rather  it  is  a  state  of  mind  crystal 
clear  and  certain.  It  gazes  on  the  finished  structure  of  life 
at  first  hand,  as  it  comes  complete  from  the  Master's  shaping, 
with  the  litter  and  the  scaffolding  cleared  away.  To  him  the 
battle  of  achieving  life  is  fought  and  won,  the  sins  and  childish 
crudeness  of  an  old  era  put  away  in  a  forgotten  limbo  to  which 
his  spirit  is  henceforth  for  ever  dead.  To  him  it  remains  now 


302  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

only  to  walk  in  a  radiant  new  light,  the  light  of  men,  and  to 
explore  the  splendors  and  vitalizing  powers  of  the  light.  What 
such  an  attitude  of  mind,  placed  as  it  is  in  history,  has  to  im- 
part to  us,  is  surely  of  untold  value.  For  in  this  intuitive  de- 
termination the  mind  of  St.  John  is  also  the  mind  of  Christ,  a 
motion  as  it  were  straight  from  the  breast  on  which  he  leaned 
at  supper;  the  self -same  mind  indeed  which  St.  Paul  says  we 
also  have,  in  our  scope  and  degree;  though  most  of  us  must 
still  be  Marthas,  cumbered  with  much  serving,  rather  than 
Marys,  sitting  serene  and  satisfied  at  the  feet  of  the  Life  In- 
deed. With  a  great  sum  the  most  of  us  must  obtain  our  free- 
dom. St.  John  was  free  born. 

When,  however,  we  enter  into  the  mind  of  St.  Paul,  we  find 
ourselves  in  a  very  different  region,  a  region  more  like  the  one 
in  which  the  ordinary  man  must  move,  and  it  may  be  for  that 
reason  more  genial  and  stimulating.  A  mind  his,  not  less  pene- 
trative of  the  secrets  of  being  than  that  of  St.  John;  equally 
capable  of  immediate  vision,  though  his  times  of  vision  were 
not  his  habitual  way  of  thinking,  as  of  a  mystic,  but  those 
rare  occasions  when  his  soul  mounted  up  with  wings  as  eagles 
do.  One  such  he  refers  to  as  the  turning-point  of  his  whole 
life,  that  vision  on  the  way  to  Damascus,  when  he  saw  Christ 
face  to  face,  in  a  glory  that  left  him  blinded  but  filled  with  a 
grand  new  purpose.  Another  such,  in  which  however  he  would 
not  glory,  transported  him  to  the  third  heaven,  where  he  heard 
unspeakable  words  impossible  for  a  man  to  utter.  It  is  note- 
worthy that  in  all  these  visions  and  revelations  which  Scrip- 
ture records,  the  recipients  took  the  matter  just  the  other  way 
round  from  our  way.  They  never  questioned,  as  we  do,  the 
objective  reality  of  what  they  saw  and  heard;  to  them  the 
scene  on  the  mount  of  Transfiguration,  and  the  interviews  after 
Christ's  resurrection,  and  the  sight  of  their  Lord  ascending  be- 
yond the  cloud,  and  the  vision  on  the  way  to  Damascus,  and 
the  mystery  of  the  third  heaven,  and  the  apocalypse  of  him 
who  was  in  the  spirit  on  the  Lord's  day,  were  one  and  all  au- 
thentic glimpses  of  that  which  most  deeply  is,  though  they 
might  be  uncertain,  as  St.  Paul  was,  whether  they  themselves, 


THE  ACCOMPLISHED  FACT  303 

when  they  saw  such  things,  were  in  the  body  or  out  of  the 
body.  To  us  all  such  things,  whether  told  in  Scripture  or  al- 
leged in  modern  experience,  are  unreal,  not  to  say  uncanny; 
subjective  we  call  it,  hypnotic,  a  gleam  from  our  subliminal 
consciousness,  not  such  revelation  as  can  be  brought  to  evi- 
dence in  a  court  of  justice.  We  never  doubt  that  we  are  in  the 
body,  and  we  demand  that  everything  that  would  claim  actu- 
ality and  authenticity  also  be  in  the  body.  Rightly  enough, 
perhaps;  our  psychology  has  changed,  though  human  nature 
remains;  and  it  may  be  worth  while  to  remind  ourselves  that 
more  rigidly  scientific  conceptions,  and  more  up  to  date,  are 
not  ipso  facto  more  correct,  and  there  are  regions  of  our  per- 
sonality and  its  hidden  connections  yet  to  be  explored.  But 
at  any  rate  —  to  return  from  this  digression  —  St.  Paul's  is 
not  a  mind  to  glory  in  mystic  states  and  visions;  and  what  he 
has  to  tell  us  about  life  and  its  essential  elements  is  made  up, 
like  our  insights  and  reasonings,  on  other  grounds.  We  have 
seen  men  of  unsophisticated  mind  reporting  what  they  alleged 
was  fact  and  not  cunningly  devised  fable;  we  have  seen  in 
St.  John  one  who  by  masterly  intuition  identified  what  he  saw 
with  the  greatest  fact  that  can  be  revealed  to  men;  and  now  in 
St.  Paul  we  see  one  who,  equally  based  on  historic  fact,  applies 
to  this  the  deductive  mind,  the  mind  of  reason  and  logical  proc- 
esses, and  determines  its  relation  with  man  as  he  is,  and  with 
the  concepts  of  a  storied  and  thinking  past. 

To  enter  with  any  detail  into  the  natural  history  of  the 
mind  of  St.  Paul,  admittedly  one  of  the  most  colossal  minds 
of  history,  would  be  quite  beyond  our  scope  or  occasion  here; 
we  merely  wish  to  see,  as  we  did  in  the  case  of  St.  John,  how 
his  type  of  mind  places  him,  so  to  say,  in  relation  to  this  great 
problem  that  we  are  tracing,  the  problem  of  the  Life  Indeed. 
St.  Peter  and  St.  John  were  Galileans,  as  was  also  our  Lord; 
they  came  from  a  region  and  atmosphere  where  the  rigid  old 
Jewish  traditions  sat  more  lightly  on  men's  minds,  and  where 
there  were  fewer  clogs  of  prejudice  to  keep  them  from  leaping 
forward  into  a  new  revelation  of  things.  The  writer  of  the 
Epistle  to  the  Hebrews  inherited  the  priestly  and  sacerdotal 


304  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

tradition;  he  thought  in  its  terms;  but  this,  which  was  in  itself 
a  symbol,  an  allegory,  a  prophecy,  was  no  clog  to  the  new 
view;  rather,  as  soon  as  its  fulfilment  came  in  sight,  it  gave 
him  wings  of  faith,  so  that  he  could  without  effort  enter  into 
the  holiest  by  a  new  and  living  way.  St.  Paul's  mind,  on  the 
other  hand,  was  laden,  both  by  heritage  and  education,  with 
an  accumulation  of  traditions,  interpretations,  legal  and  na- 
tional presuppositions,  which  nothing  short  of  a  colossal  mind 
could  resolve,  but  which,  once  resolved  and  concentrated  on 
the  new  life,  must  needs  be  of  untold  significance  to  the  cause; 
we  may  almost  say  the  fate  of  the  new  cause,  as  a  system  and 
sweet  reasonableness,  lay  trembling  in  his  masterly  hand.  If 
he  had  reached  the  point  where  a  vision  on  the  Damascus  road 
would  set  his  susceptible  soul  right,  what  a  stroke  of  resurrec- 
tion genius  —  let  us  say  it  with  reverence  —  it  was  on  the 
part  of  the  Master  to  vouchsafe  it!  St.  Paul  was  brought  up 
a  Pharisee,  according  to  the  strictest  sect  of  the  Jewish  faith, 
trained  in  all  the  lore  of  scribes  and  doctors  and  rabbis, 
moulded  in  the  rigid  requirements  of  law  and  oracle,  no  ele- 
ment of  .the  old  dispensation  lacking.  The  whole  pattern  of 
the  twilight  stratum,  from  the  beginning  up  to  the  fulness  of 
the  time,  found  in  him  as  it  were  an  instrument,  a  working- 
tool,  shaped  to  its  hand.  But  he  had  not  become  congealed  in 
the  austerity  and  pedantry  of  the  old.  There  was  in  him  a 
tremendous  fire  and  zeal,  a  soaring  poetic  constructive  nature, 
so  that  when  he  became  Christian  he  could  have  insights  and 
speak  with  tongues  beyond  them  all;  a  steady  conscientious- 
ness, too,  which  compelled  him  to  act  on  convictions  new  or 
old,  and  made  him  dare  to  correct  himself  and  innovate,  chang- 
ing from  a  persecutor  to  an  apostle.  All  this  cast  of  mind, 
susceptible  as  it  was  to  growth  and  change,  was  no  wavering 
or  double  mind;  it  was  too  solidly  based  for  that;  rather  it 
was  grandly  consistent  with  itself,  a  mind  that  was  strong  to 
shoulder  aside  its  huge  impediments  and  make  its  way  to  its 
goal  of  faith  and  life. 

Two  great  things  St.  Paul  had  to  do,  in  his  apostolic  mission 
to  the  world;  either  of  them  work  for  a  mind  of  the  highest 


THE  ACCOMPLISHED  FACT  305 

order:  to  become  free  from  the  law,  thus  settling  the  world's 
account  with  the  old  system  of  things;  and  to  open  the  way 
of  life  to  the  Gentiles,  thus  making  the  new  pulsation  of  faith 
universal.  No  one  but  he  had  the  peculiar  spiritual  combina- 
tion to  compass  these.  St.  Peter,  strong  rock  of  the  church  as 
he  was  and  sturdy  in  his  place,  had  not  mind  enough,  nor  train- 
ing; you  remember  how,  even  after  his  vision  of  the  great 
sheet  let  down,  showing  him  with  regard  to  the  heathen  that 
nothing  was  common  or  unclean,  he  could  not  commit  himself 
whole-souled  to  the  new  way  thus  opened,  and  reverted  to  a 
Jewish  and  legal  Christianity.  St.  John,  the  Sir  Galahad  of 
the  apostolic  circle,  dwelt  in  a  mystic  contemplative  region 
of  his  own;  he  had,  as  it  were,  seen  the  Grail  face  to  face,  and 
was  rapt  away  from  men's  earthly  errors  and  conflicts,  an 
idealist  rather  than  a  struggler, 

And  now  his  place  desires  him  in  vain, 
However  they  may  crown  him  otherwhere. 

The  Galileans  must  take  to  themselves  the  aid  of  the  Pharisee; 
for  there  is  a  great  work  to  be  done,  a  world-work  rooted  in 
all  the  evolutionary  past;  and  there  must  be  left  no  loose 
joints,  no  crude  bungled  expedients ;  and  in  the  orderly  growth 
yet  to  come  all  the  contributing  elements  must  be  accounted 
for.  The  empire  of  law,  inconclusive  as  it  is  for  life,  is  not 
for  nothing,  and  it  can  pass  only  by  fulfilment.  The  Jewish 
exclusiveness,  necessary  though  it  was  for  a  time,  cannot  throw 
open  its  gates  to  anarchy  and  licence,  for  the  sake  of  making 
itself  acceptable  to  the  Gentiles;  there  must  still  be  an  eternal 
separateness  and  antipathy  to  whatever  is  unholy  and  impure. 
Hence  the  place  we  have  found  for  the  reconciling  constructive 
mind  of  St.  Paul. 

But  what  we  are  concerned  with  here,  in  pursuance  of  our 
general  subject,  is,  to  note  how  life  and  immortality  come  to 
light,  to  a  mind  shaped  and  trained  like  St.  Paul's;  how  its 
large  elements  reveal  themselves  in  order  and  relation,  and 
what  attitude  of  living  and  belief  is  thereby  engendered.  And 
as  we  look  at  it,  in  comparison  with  that  of  St.  John,  the  first 


306  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

thing  that  strikes  us  is,  how  much  more  closely  it  corresponds 
to  the  life  we  all  have  to  live,  our  ordinary  life  of  hopes  and 
fears,  of  struggle  and  suffering  and  aspiration,  of  gradually 
forming  ideals  and  insights,  of  actual  experience,  so  rich  yet 
often  so  baffling.  St.  John  does  us  good  by  holding  before  our 
eyes,  serene  and  undisturbed  above  us,  the  region  of  the  purer 
air  and  the  eternally  won  victory.  St.  Paul  does  us  good  by 
showing  us  the  conflict  still  on,  the  slow  shaping  of  means  to 
ends,  the  rising  into  assured  strength  and  faith  through  the  dis- 
cipline of  toil  and  suffering.  The  light  is  the  same  perfect 
light  of  life;  it  comes  to  the  self -same  evolution  and  revelation 
in  the  end;  but  with  St.  John  walking  in  the  light  has  become 
as  it  were  an  instinctive  thing,  wherein  all  our  tendencies  and 
powers  join  in  sweet  harmony  and  consent;  while  with  St. 
Paul  the  rebellious  elements  must  be  subdued  and  tamed,  and 
the  experiences  in  plain  sight  before  us  must  be  fully  reckoned 
with,  and  the  splendors  of  the  unseen  must  dawn  upon  us  by 
degrees.  While  St.  John,  with  his  powerful  intuition,  leaps  to 
the  end  and  ignores  the  slow  steps  of  process,  St.  Paul,  with 
his  load  of  tradition  and  bodily  infirmity,  and  with  a  mind 
that  must  deduce  things  from  point  to  point,  is  still  in  the 
thick  of  the  process,  clearing  away  the  obstructing  clouds  and 
fogs. 

For  one  thing,  St.  Paul  must  stay  to  wrestle  with  the  prob- 
lem of  righteousness,  that  ideal  of  the  law  of  being;  and  in 
the  same  conflict  he  must  have  dealings  with  the  law  itself, 
which  has  become  to  him  a  thing  not  Mosaic  merely  but  cos- 
mic and  elemental.  And  as  his  exacting,  conscientious  nature 
looks  into  it,  he  makes  a  great  discovery:  namely,  that  in  the 
nature  of  the  case  and  of  man  the  law  is  an  impossible  thing. 
It  cannot  be  kept.  However  athletic  the  man  may  be  to  train 
himself  in  the  observance  of  it,  his  sinful  will  or  weakness  will 
break  loose  somewhere;  he  will  transgress  or  come  short,  and 
offending  in  one  point  will  manifest  the  alien  spirit  and  so  be 
guilty  of  all.  To  cherish  the  only  ideal  worthy  of  a  perfect 
law  necessitates  this,  saying  nothing  of  the  corruption  and  in- 
firmity of  man.  Like  Arthur's  ideal  for  his  knights,  so  his 


THE  ACCOMPLISHED  FACT  307 

ideal  righteousness,  imperative  as  it  is,  has  become  unattain- 
able: 

For  the  King 

Will  bind  thee  by  such  vows,  as  is  a  shame 
A  man  should  not  be  bound  by,  yet  the  which 
No  man  can  keep. 

Besides  this  too,  he  finds  a  law  of  sin  in  his  members,  warring 
against  the  law  of  his  mind,  and  bringing  him  into  captivity. 
St.  Paul  was  too  spiritual,  too  penetrative  to  remain  a  typical 
Pharisee;  he  never  could  have  stood  in  the  Temple,  like  that 
Pharisee  of  the  parable,  and  thanked  God  that  he  was  not  as 
other  men  are.  The  innate  corruption  and  limitation  that  is 
in  all  men  he  saw  and  felt  and  acknowledged;  he  put  himself 
by  the  side  of  the  most  degraded,  in  that  category  where  all 
are  included  under  sin,  if  by  any  power  of  insight,  looking  from 
that  common  depth,  he  might  discover  light  and  life.  And 
one  of  his  two  great  achievements,  as  I  have  noted,  is  to  have 
become  free  from  this  impossible  law,  this  body  of  death.  He 
discovers  this  freedom  not  by  anarchy,  not  by  licence,  not  by 
any  sort  of  indifference  to  righteousness,  but  by  the  access  of 
a  higher  power  of  life.  "The  law  of  the  spirit  of  life  in  Christ 
Jesus,"  he  says,  "hath  made  me  free  from  the  law  of  sin  and 
death."  This  is  his  grand  solution,  whereby  in  every  man's 
soul  the  battle  is  fought  out,  and  the  victory  won  by  a  power 
not  our  own,  yet  truly  our  own,  for  it  is  the  spirit  of  highest 
manhood. 

No  one  reaches  greater  heights  of  triumphant,  exultant  life, 
no  one  brings  forth  more  abundant  fruits  of  the  spirit,  than 
does  St.  Paul;  yet  about  it  all  there  is  the  note  of  effort,  van- 
quishing of  untoward  elements,  vigilant  watchfulness  and 
overcoming.  "Walk  in  the  spirit,"  he  says,  "and  ye  shall  not 
fulfil  the  lusts  of  the  flesh";  but  you  see  the  lusts  of  the  flesh 
are  there,  in  fell  working  potency;  to  be  subdued  not  as  St. 
John  would  do  and  as  Jesus  did,  by  the  sheer  impact  of  an- 
tipathy, but  by  the  expulsive  power  of  a  new  affection  taking 
up  and  preempting  the  field.  It  is  a  strategy,  a  directed  battle 
of  life.  So,  as  compared  with  St.  John's  tranquil  ideal,  we  may 


308  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

say  that  instead  of  walking  calm  and  holy  as  a  perfected  new 
man  St.  Paul  must  first  kill  the  old  man.  There  is  a  sternness 
and  peremptoriness  about  this  idea  which  comports  well  with 
St.  Paul's  fiery  turbulent  spirit.  The  figure  of  death,  not  only 
of  putting  our  evil  propensities  to  death  but  of  ourselves  de- 
terminately  dying  to  what  is  alien  to  us,  plays  quite  a  part  in 
St.  Paul's  thinking;  we  are  not  merely  to  pity  ourselves  as 
naturally  sinful  but  candidates  for  healing  and  forgiveness; 
we  are  rather  to  take  heroic  measures  with  our  whole  inner 
nature,  are  to  reckon  ourselves  dead  to  sin  but  alive  to 
righteousness.  In  this  new  energy  of  the  spirit  we  are  to  enact 
in  ourselves,  so  to  say,  the  great  elemental  drama  of  life  and 
death,  strenuous,  determinate;  with  the  triumph  of  newness 
of  life  is  to  be  coordinated  the  grim  tragedy  of  the  death  of 
the  old  man. 

Just  so  it  is,  too,  that  St.  Paul  approaches  the  life  and  min- 
istry of  Christ.  To  him,  you  know,  that  life  was  not  a  subject 
for  detailed  biography  but  a  rounded  solution  of  things,  an 
idea;  he  was  an  apostle  born,  as  he  says,  out  of  due  time,  and 
did  not  know  Christ  after  the  flesh.  This  was  to  his  advan- 
tage, perhaps,  in  his  work  of  universalizing  the  gospel;  for  as 
the  world  grew  older,  and  customs  changed,  men  could  not 
take,  as  the  first  disciples  did,  the  naive  and  childlike  way  of 
following  the  steps  of  an  example;  they  must  take  rather  the 
adult  way  of  living  in  the  same  spirit  of  love  and  faith.  And 
this  is  how  St.  Paul  apprehends  Christ.  Of  the  specific  events 
of  Christ's  life  his  spirit  fastens  especially  on  the  death  and 
resurrection;  these  are  truths  for  every  man  to  incorporate 
in  his  being;  but  he  does  not  dissociate  these  two,  as  St.  John 
virtually  does;  to  him  resurrection  is  resurrection  from  the 
dead.  If  we  had  only  St.  John's  ideal  to  go  by,  we  might  al- 
most gather  that  the  uprise  of  life  was  designed  to  be  just  a 
kind  of  melting  into  the  next  stage  of  being,  the  unveiling  of 
a  glory,  like  the  transfiguration  of  Christ,  without  any  conno- 
tation of  antecedent  death  at  all.  But  this,  however  true  it 
may  be  spiritually,  remains  necessarily  a  very  unreal  thing  to 
us  here  in  the  body,  who  with  all  our  potencies  of  spiritual 


THE  ACCOMPLISHED  FACr  309 

achievement,  still  have  physical  death  to  reckon  with.  St. 
Paul,  however,  takes  death  and  resurrection  together;  one 
must  rise  out  of  the  other;  one  derives  its  worth  and  stamina 
from  the  other.  There  must  be  effort  and  strenuousness  and 
sacrifice  to  correspond  to  the  glory  and  rapture  of  the  uprise. 
It  was  in  this  way,  rather  than  after  the  flesh,  that  St.  Paul 
aspired  to  know  Christ;  it  was  for  this  kind  of  knowledge  that 
he  counted  all  other  things  as  relatively  contemptible.  "That 
I  may  know  him,"  he  says,  "and  the  power  of  his  resurrection, 
and  the  fellowship  of  his  sufferings;  being  made  conformable 
unto  his  death,  if  by  any  means  I  might  attain  unto  the  resur- 
rection of  the  dead."  He  had  a  positive  appetency  for  all  the 
hard  things  that  lay  in  the  road  to  such  a  culmination;  for  the 
tribulations  which,  because,  through  the  wholesome  discipline 
of  patience,  experience,  and  hope,  they  led  eventually  to  the 
shedding  abroad  of  the  love  of  God  in  our  hearts,  he  could 
glory  in;  even  for  some  glorious  opportunity,  in  his  own  flesh, 
to  fill  out  the  sufferings  of  Christ.  Thus  through  that  same 
spirit  of  life  his  fervent  endeavor  was  to  create  a  Christ  within 
his  own  energizing  turbulent  nature.  He  has  much  to  say  of 
the  death  of  Christ;  he  has  theories,  more  or  less  vague  and 
rabbinic,  of  what  is  called  atonement.  As  we  compare  his 
words  on  this  matter  with  each  other  we  cannot  say  he  worked 
his  thoughts  on  it  quite  clear  and  luminous;  but  on  one  point 
he  is  positive  and  strenuous:  Christ  died,  not  merely  that  we 
might  live,  but  that  we  might  die  the  same  kind  of  death,  in 
the  same  spirit  of  sacrifice,  of  love  to  men,  and  faith  in  the 
regenerative  power  of  human  nature.  If  He  laid  down  His 
life  that  He  might  take  it  again,  and  in  so  doing  take  all  the 
fulness  of  manhood  with  it,  so  also  the  spirit  of  Christ- 
like  manhood  should  impel  us  to  do;  it  is  our  business  not 
to  be  mere  beneficiaries  of  Christ  but  uttermost  reproducers 
of  Him. 

The  same  conception  of  things  shows  very  significantly  in 
his  attitude  toward  the  majestic  ideal  of  righteousness,  the 
righteousness  which  is  of  faith,  as  contrasted  with  the  old 
righteousness,  which  is  of  the  law.  The  righteousness  which 


310  THE   LIFE   INDEED 

is  of  the  law  reduces  to  a  very  simple  and  obvious  thing:  the 
man  who  doeth  these  things  shall  live  by  them;  that  is  plain 
enough,  and  that  is  sufficing.  But  here  comes  in  his  tremen- 
dous discovery  that  the  law  is  an  impossibility;  the  trouble  is 
you  cannot  truly  do  these  things.  Express  life  in  terms  'of 
doing,  of  work  and  wage,  and  you  come  to  a  deadlock;  your 
power  runs  out;  you  have  not  life  enough  to  fulfil  the  ideal  of 
a  law  which  expands  to  a  thing  so  impossibly  holy  and  just 
and  good.  You  must  have  a  new  access  of  power,  of  the  spirit 
of  life.  And  now  when  that  spirit  takes  possession  of  you  and 
puts  you  into  a  wholly  new  attitude  to  things,  the  attitude  of 
initiative,  venture,  faith,  how  shall  it  work  out  its  problem  of 
righteousness?  St.  Paul  has  shown  us  this,  in  a  passage  which 
has  always  been  too  hard  a  nut  for  the  commentators  to  crack. 
Let  us  look  at  it  a  moment.  After  saying  that  "  Christ  is  the 
end  of  the  law  for  righteousness  to  every  one  that  believeth," 
he  gives  that  belief  a  voice,  sets  it  to  philosophizing,  as  it  were, 
on  the  question  how  it,  as  such,  shall  produce  righteousness. 
"The  righteousness  which  is  of  faith,"  he  says,  "speaketh  on 
this  wise,  Say  not  in  thine  heart,  Who  shall  ascend  into 
heaven?  (that  is,  to  bring  Christ  down) :  Or,  Who  shall  de- 
scend into  the  deep?  (that  is,  to  bring  up  Christ  again  from 
the  dead.)  But  what  saith  it?  The  word  is  nigh  thee,  even 
in  thy  mouth,  and  in  thy  heart:  that  is,  the  word  of  faith, 
which  we  preach;  That  if  thou  shalt  confess  with  thy  mouth 
the  Lord  Jesus,  and  shalt  believe  in  thine  heart  that  God  hath 
raised  him  from  the  dead,  thou  shalt  be  saved.  For  with  the 
heart  man  believeth  unto  righteousness;  and  with  the  mouth 
confession  is  made  unto  salvation.  For  the  scripture  saith, 
Whosoever  believeth  on  him  shall  not  be  ashamed."  The  ob- 
scurity of  this  passage  comes  partly  from  the  fact  that  St. 
Paul  is  adapting  old  scripture  words  to  his  purpose,  perhaps 
with  a  little  touch  of  rabbinism;  but  if  we  keep  to  his  funda- 
mental presupposition  and  point  of  view  the  sense  is  clear.  We 
must  remember  that  faith  is  speaking,  and  trying  to  get  into 
terms  an  ideal  of  action,  of  righteousness.  Now  if  we  are 
trying  to  attain  to  an  ideal,  two  conceivable  temptations  may 


THE  ACCOMPLISHED  FACT  311 

rise  to  invalidate  our  endeavor:  we  may  either  desire  to  lower 
the  ideal,  so  as  to  bring  it  within  bounds  of  feasibility;  or  we 
may  desire  to  attain  the  same  ideal  by  a  different  way.  To 
both  of  these  temptations  St.  Paul  interposes  his  negative. 
There  your  ideal  is,  clear  and  plain;  you  see  the  life  that  Christ 
has  achieved,  the  perfect  Tightness  of  manhood,  you  see  the 
way  he  took  to  reach  it;  all  lies  before  you  in  the  good  news 
that  we  are  preaching.  Now  if  your  faith  is  true  and  integral, 
you  won't  try  to  lower  that  ideal  of  life,  by  bringing  Christ 
down  to  something  less  than  consummate  life,  you  will  take 
the  ideal  just  as  it  is,  however  lofty,  and  commit  yourself  to 
it;  neither  will  you  try  some  other  way  to  get  to  it,  by  bringing 
Christ  up  from  the  dead,  making  the  way  less  strenuous  than 
death  and  resurrection;  you  will  believe  in  your  heart  that  this, 
however  hard,  is  the  one  perfect  way  of  rising  to  perfect 
righteousness,  and  all  the  life  which  your  mouth  confesses,  the 
action  which  mirrors  itself  in  your  sincere  word,  will  conform 
itself  to  that  way  of  voluntary  death,  if  by  any  means  you  too 
may  attain  resurrection,  and  that  same  Christ  will  be  your 
Lord  of  life.  Such  faith  will  be  ashamed  neither  of  the  height 
of  its  ideal  nor  of  the  depth  of  humiliation  through  which  loy- 
alty to  it  leads.  For  this  spirit  of  Christ  has  become  a  prac- 
tical element  of  manhood;  not  only  of  the  emotional  rapture 
which  the  contemplation  of  its  glory  engenders,  but  equally 
of  that  sturdy  righteousness  which  expresses  itself  in  doing 
and  enduring  and  truth. 

With  St.  Paul,  conscious  as  he  was  of  the  law  of  sin  in  his 
members,  and  moving  in  a  Gentile  world  of  fleshly  degradation 
and  corruption,  the  life  of  the  rebellious  body  and  the  element 
of  physical  death  cannot  be  ignored;  they  must  play  a  car- 
dinal part  in  his  tragical  drama  of  the  consummation  of  life. 
If  we  had  only  St.  John  to  think  for  us,  with  his  idealized  word 
"Whosoever  liveth  and  believeth  in  me  shall  never  die,"  we 
could  hardly  think  of  any  other  outcome  of  existence  but  that 
of  a  disembodied  spirit,  whatever  that  may  be;  and  even  here 
in  the  flesh  St.  John  conceives  of  life  almost  as  it  were  dis- 
embodied, without  any  members  at  all  to  work  weakness  and 


3i2  THE   LIFE   INDEED 

confusion.  With  St.  Paul  the  members  are  all  here,  with  their 
tendencies  and  heredities;  and  our  business  is  to  present  them 
as  instruments  of  righteousness  unto  holiness;  our  privilege 
and  glory  to  present  our  bodies  a  living  sacrifice,  holy,  accept- 
able unto  God,  which  is  our  reasonable  service.  It  is  in  just 
this  connection,  you  remember,  that  he  bids  us  be  transfigured, 
metamorphosed,  by  the  renewing  of  our  minds;  as  if  somehow 
the  new  spirit  that  is  in  us  were  to  shape  a  new  body.  And 
this,  in  fact,  is  just  his  fundamental  conception.  When  the 
life  rises  to  its  height  it  is  not  to  be  a  division  and  dissociation 
of  the  elements  of  nature,  not  the  survival  and  uprise  of  a  piece 
of  life,  but  the  whole  nature  —  body,  soul,  and  spirit  —  enter- 
ing a  higher  stage  of  being  together,  intact  and  glorified.  For 
this  he  works;  to  this  end  he  conforms  his  precepts  of  conduct; 
these  temples  of  the  Holy  Spirit,  which  our  bodies  are,  are  to 
be  kept  so  holy  that  corruption  can  have  no  power  on  them, 
here  or  hereafter.  This  idea  fills  his  cosmic  ideal  too;  he  has 
a  genuine  conception  of  the  far  end  of  evolution  in  his  thought, 
of  the  whole  creation  groaning  and  travailing  in  pain  together 
until  now,  waiting  for  the  adoption,  to  wit,  the  redemption  of 
the  body.  To  this  end  he  conforms  that  constant  figure  of 
his,  of  our  being  members  of  Christ,  working  His  will  and 
agencies  of  His  spirit,  while  He,  the  Head,  sends  forth  the 
intelligence  and  the  impulse  that  always  animates  us.  It  is  a 
noble,  a  world-filling  conception;  with  the  practical  value  of 
conforming  to  men  and  things  as  they  are.  Here  is  the  spirit 
already  with  us  and  in  us;  the  power  of  resurrection  already 
circulating  through  our  members,  shaping  an  organism  within, 
which  he  calls  a  spiritual  body,  and  thus  getting  ready  for  a 
final  uprise  which  in  the  end  is  not  death  at  all,  but  birth. 
The  spirit  is  already  ours  by  a  new  birth  in  Christ;  but  it  re- 
mains yet  for  the  body,  through  the  nourishing  and  transfigur- 
ing power  of  the  spirit,  acting  through  the  acts  and  sufferings, 
the  ennobled  energies  of  our  earthly  life,  to  be  born.  It  is  as 
if  physically  we  were  still  in  the  embryo  stage  of  existence, 
still  in  the  womb  of  a  shaping  active  world,  drawing  form  and 
development  and  beauty  from  its  meats  and  drinks  and  work 


THE  ACCOMPLISHED  FACT  313 

and  plans;  and  as  if,  when  the  hour  which  we  call  death 
strikes,  our  resurrection  were  by  the  birth  of  a  full-orbed  or- 
ganism of  life  to  demonstrate  its  majesty  and  power.  So  when 
at  last  the  body  is  laid  aside  it  is,  as  it  were,  but  the  casting 
away  of  a  placenta,  an  afterbirth,  whose  function  is  done,  it- 
self henceforth  a  worthless  insignificant  thing.  This,  I  believe, 
is  virtually  St.  Paul's  conception;  and  it  conforms  exactly,  you 
see,  to  the  long  developed  evolutionary  conception  which  we 
have  been  tracing. 

So  when  St.  Paul  approaches  the  end  of  life  he  conies  after 
all,  by  his  own  more  strenuous  way,  to  just  the  same  outcome 
that  St.  John  held  so  serenely  before  him;  for  him  too,  as 
truly  as  with  St.  John  and  Jesus,  death  is  actually  and  literally 
abolished.  He  expresses  this  under  the  figure  of  striking  a 
tent  and  moving  on  to  a  new  and  higher  stage  of  our  journey. 
"We  know,"  he  says,  "that  if  our  earthly  house  of  this  taber- 
nacle were  dissolved,  we  have  a  building  of  God,  an  house  not 
made  with  hands,  eternal  in  the  heavens.  For  in  this  we  groan, 
earnestly  desiring  to  be  clothed  upon  with  our  house  which 
is  from  heaven:  if  so  that  being  clothed  we  shall  not  be  found 
naked.  For  we  that  are  in  this  tabernacle  do  groan,  being  bur- 
dened: not  for  that  we  would  be  unclothed,  but  clothed  upon, 
that  mortality  might  be  swallowed  up  of  life."  So  it  is:  he  can 
be  content  with  no  piecemeal  survival,  no  disembodied  naked 
essence  going  on  to  an  uncouth  and  unimaginable  beyond,  leav- 
ing its  values  of  sense  and  bodily  existence  behind;  it  takes 
its  new  body  with  it,  the  body  which,  though  sown  in  dishonor 
and  corruption,  is  raised  in  strength  and  beauty.  What  this 
spiritual  body  is,  this  organism  for  the  behests  and  activities 
of  the  higher  life,  we  cannot  well  understand  until  we  can  study 
its  anatomy  and  physiology  from  the  other  side  of  the  tapestry 
of  life;  but  we  cannot  call  it  an  illogical  or  irrational  idea;  it 
conforms,  in  fact,  more  closely  to  our  evolutionary  demand 
than  any  other.  Evolution  must  henceforth  be  spiritual,  but 
it  need  not  throw  away  all  the  discoveries  it  has  made  of  or- 
ganism and  function  and  the  orderly  support  of  the  conscious- 
ness and  the  will. 


3i4  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

So  with  the  shaping  mind  of  St.  Paul,  though  physical  death 
remains  a  fact,  with  all  its  accompaniments,  yet  because  its 
sting  is  removed,  and  life  has  so  swallowed  it  up  as  to  have 
transformed  it  into  a  glorious  birth,  it  is  abolished,  and  life 
and  immortality  stand  forth  in  fulness  of  noonday  light. 


VII 
INVENTORY  OF  VITAL  VALUES 

"What  is  it  when  suspected  in  that  Power 
Who  undertook  to  make  and  made  the  world, 
Devised  and  did  effect  man,  body  and  soul, 
Ordained  salvation  for  them  both,  and  yet, 
Well,  is  the  thing  we  see,  salvation?" 

I.    THE  UNVEILED  MYSTERY 
II.    THOUGH  OUR  OUTWARD  MAN  PERISH 
III.    WHY  STAND  YE  GAZING  UP  INTO  HEAVEN? 


VII 
INVENTORY  OF  VITAL  VALUES 

NEVERTHELESS  I  tell  you  the  truth,"  said  Jesus  in 
his  farewell  discourse;  "it  is  expedient  for  you  that 
I  go  away:  for  if  I  go  not  away,  the  Comforter  will 
not  come  unto  you;  but  if  I  depart,  I  will  send  him  unto  you. 
And  when  he  is  come,  he  will  reprove  the  world  of  sin,  and  of 
righteousness,  and  of  judgment:  Of  sin,  because  they  believe 
not  on  me;  Of  righteousness,  because  I  go  to  my  Father,  and 
ye  see  me  no  more;  Of  judgment,  because  the  prince  of  this 
world  is  judged."  These  words,  plain  and  simple,  as  adapted 
to  the  simple-minded  group  who  first  heard  them,  map  out  on 
broad  lines  all  the  inner  history,  all  the  history  that  can  be 
called  vital,  which  is  yet  to  be;  for  they  are  in  the  enlarging 
order  of  things,  revealing  the  connecting  link  between  Christ 
and  humanity,  and  thus  opening  the  culminating  stage  of  the 
majestic  chapter  of  manhood  evolution.  What  was  expedient 
for  them  is  just  as  expedient  for  us.  The  disciples  thought,  as 
tradition  had  told  them,  that  when  the  Messiah  came  He  would 
abide  forever;  and  to  their  conception  that  was  the  summit 
of  well-being,  to  have  always  with  them  the  bodily  presence 
of  Him  who  could  be  implicitly  followed  as  King  and  Leader 
and  Judge.  Even  these  solemn  words  of  Jesus  did  not  strike 
in,  at  first;  this  old  idea  held  the  field  and  crowded  them  out; 
one  of  the  first  questions  they  asked  Him  when  they  saw  Him 
in  resurrection  form,  safe  back  from  the  dead,  was,  "Lord, 
wilt  thou  at  this  time  restore  again  the  kingdom  of  Israel?" 
But  you  see  it  takes  time  to  get  a  new  ideal  into  vital  power; 
and  their  minds  were  not  enlarged  enough  to  see  how  rudi- 
mental,  how  childish  it  is  after  all,  to  have  all  our  thoughts 
and  beliefs  and  judgments  made  for  us,  and  doled  out  to  us, 
as  it  were,  from  a  central  bureau,  leaving  us  in  general  unable 

317 


3i8  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

to  take  a  step  forward  until  we  receive  marching  orders.  Even 
now,  after  nineteen  centuries,  we  see  how  slow  the  world  is  to 
replace  the  monarchic  idea  by  the  democratic;  how  slow  and 
timid  we  all  are  to  bear  our  weight  on  the  law  of  the  spirit  of 
life,  as  feeling  within  us  the  wisdom  and  authority  to  do  so. 
And  yet  this,  just  this,  is  what  our  Lord's  words  contemplate. 
It  is  expedient  for  us  that  the  Incarnate  Word  go  away;  that 
He  be  no  more  an  object  of  sense,  to  be  seen  and  heard  and 
followed  about  from  place  to  place;  because  henceforth  the 
guidance  of  life  must  be  incorporated  with  our  nature,  breath- 
ing with  our  breath,  thinking  with  our  thoughts,  loving  and 
hating  with  our  love  and  hate,  shaping  the  fair  fabric  of  life 
with  our  hands.  Our  Lord's  departure  was  in  the  way  to  this. 
He  left  us,  but  as  He  said  He  would  not  leave  us  orphans;  left 
us  that  a  better  thing  than  His  bodily  presence  might  come  to 
us.  And  if  we,  like  the  disciples,  doubt  what  could  be  better 
than  His  bodily  presence,  a  moment's  reflection  guides  us  to 
the  essential  truth  that  the  new  thing  that  was  to  come  was 
the  self -same  thing  that  was  taking  its  leave;  only  it  was  to 
come  closer,  not  stopping  at  our  bewildered  eyes  but  coming 
all  the  way  to  the  centre  of  our  being;  not  coming  to  sojourn 
as  in  a  tabernacle,  but  to  take  up  its  permanent  abode,  as  in 
a  house  not  made  with  hands,  eternal  in  the  heavens.  The 
same  risen  Personage  who  said,  "It  is  expedient  for  you  that 
I  go  away,"  said  also,  "I  will  not  leave  you  orphans;  I  will 
come  to  you."  "Lo,  I  am  with  you  alway,  even  unto  the  end 
of  the  world." 

An  evolution,  in  the  nature  of  the  case,  must  have  a  tele- 
ology; that  is,  by  the  very  order  and  adaptation  that  are  evi- 
dent in  every  part  it  reveals  some  masterful  design,  orbing 
into  larger  fulfilment  from  the  beginning,  and  steering  toward 
a  vaster  and  determinate  end  which,  whether  it  comes  fully 
in  sight  or  not,  prophesies  its  significance  and  nature  by  the 
working  potencies  it  brings  progressively  to  light.  Natural 
selection,  development  of  species,  survival  of  the  fittest,  and 
all  the  other  processes  named  in  the  jargon  of  science  may  be 
verifiable  facts;  they  are  all  on  trial,  undergoing  the  severe 


INVENTORY  OF  VITAL   VALUES          319 

testing  of  observation  and  definition;  but  they  are  only  proc- 
esses after  all;  and  when  all  is  done  there  remains  the  main 
problem,  the  tremendous  end  toward  which  these  are  but 
means.  Evolution  cannot  rest,  any  more  than  could  Ecclesi- 
astes,  in  the  thought  that  all  this  turmoil  of  forces  and  develop- 
ments merely  goes  round  in  a  circle,  gyrating  through  the 
generations  and  returning  on  itself.  It  has  a  teleology;  how- 
ever it  moves  round  and  round  it  moves  also  upward,  revealing 
at  every  stage  a  surplusage  to  apply  on  the  next  stage  and  make 
the  sum  of  things  better,  nobler,  maturer.  This  is  the  huge 
fact  that  our  review  of  things  has  brought  to  light  in  the  grad- 
ual uprise  of  manhood  as  evolved  by  the  power  of  the  free 
spirit  of  life.  We  have  seen  how  out  of  the  species  has  risen 
the  full-orbed  individual,  fitted  in  the  obedience  of  perfect 
law,  yet  in  the  supreme  venture  of  perfect  freedom,  to  act  on 
other  individuals,  to  show  every  one  the  way  of  life,  the  ful- 
filment of  his  complete  personality.  But  now,  at  the  date  of 
Christ's  resurrection,  it  has  only  been  shown,  for  men  to  look 
at  and  analyze;  and  as  a  spectacle  it  is  to  be  withdrawn.  To 
what  end,  after  all,  was  all  this  pageant  of  life,  this  abysmal 
venture  of  faith,  this  colossal  experiment  of  being?  Success- 
ful indeed,  as  resurrection  shows ;  but  to  what  end,  unless  this 
resurrection  be  also  the  firstfruits  of  a  vaster  resurrection? 
You  remember  how  Browning,  speaking  as  if  he  were  Renan, 
has  portrayed  how  a  sensitive  mankind  feels  in  the  idea  that 
Christ  came  but  to  shine  a  little  space  and  disappear  again,  a 
description  beautiful  in  its  utter  sadness: 

Gone  now !    All  gone  across  the  dark  so  far, 

Sharpening  fast,  shuddering  ever,  shutting  still, 
Dwindling  into  the  distance,  dies  that  star 

Which  came,  stood,  opened  once !     We  gazed  our  fill 
With  upturned  faces  on  as  real  a  Face 

That,  stooping  from  grave  music  and  mild  fire, 
Took  in  our  homage,  made  a  visible  place 

Through  many  a  depth  of  glory,  gyre  on  gyre, 
For  the  dim  human  tribute.     Was  this  true? 

Could  man  indeed  avail,  mere  praise  of  his, 
To  help  by  rapture  God's  own  rapture  too, 

Thrill  with  a  heart's  red  tinge  that  pure  pale  bliss? 


320  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

Why  did  it  end?     Who  failed  to  beat  the  breast, 

And  shriek,  and  throw  the  arms  protesting  wide, 
When  a  first  shadow  showed  the  star  addressed 

Itself  to  motion,  and  on  either  side 
The  rims  contracted  as  the  rays  retired; 

The  music,  like  a  fountain's  sickening  pulse, 
Subsided  on  itself;  awhile  transpired 

Some  vestige  of  a  Face  no  pangs  convulse, 
No  prayers  retard;  then  even  this  was  gone, 

Lost  in  the  night  at  last.    We,  lone  and  left 
Silent  through  centuries,  ever  and  anon 

Venture  to  probe  again  the  Vault  bereft 
Of  all  now  save  the  lesser  lights,  a  mist 

Of  multitudinous  points,  yet  suns,  men  say  — 
And  this  leaps  ruby,  this  lurks  amethyst, 

But  where  may  hide  what  came  and  loved  our  clay? 
How  shall  the  sage  detect  on  yon  expanse 

The  star  which  chose  to  stoop  and  stay  for  us? 

All  this,  you  see,  sadly  beautiful  as  it  is,  is  in  direct  traverse 
of  the  words  of  Christ  we  have  quoted.  "I  will  not  leave  you 
orphans;  it  is  expedient  for  you  that  I  go  away."  And  as  to 
why  it  is  expedient  for  us,  we  can  do  no  better  perhaps  than 
to  add  Browning's  supplementing  stanza,  spoken  in  his  own 
proper  person,  after  he  has  described  how  Christ,  though  ab- 
sent in  bodily  presence,  has  become  identified  with  the  spirit 
of  our  world: 

That  one  Face,  far  from  vanish,  rather  grows, 

Or  decomposes  but  to  recompose, 

Become  my  universe  that  feels  and  knows! 

This,  when  we  compare  it  with  our  evolutionary  outlook,  rep- 
resents not  merely  the  poetry  and  phantasy  of  the  matter;  it  is 
the  sober  outcome  of  the  Bible  interpretation  of  life. 

The  business  of  our  present  chapter  is  to  make  an  inventory 
of  the  main  vital  values  that  inhere  in  this  culmination  of  man- 
hood evolution,  translating  them,  if  we  can  fairly  do  so,  from 
the  scripture  idiom  into  the  idiom  of  to-day. 

I.      THE    UNVEILED    MYSTERY 

The  first  vital  value  that  we  note  is  that  Christ,  now  be- 
come a  diffusive  and  universal  spirit,  is  identified  with  the  con- 


INVENTORY  OF   VITAL   FALUES          321 

scious  spirit  of  manhood  everywhere;  His  unique  life  the  rec- 
ognized life  of  man,  His  spirit  the  revealed  spirit  of  man.  The 
historical  Christ  goes  away  that  the  essential  Christ  may  take 
His  place  and  become  by  that  means  the  controlling  element 
of  character  and  a  new  vital  power  in  the  world.  The  writer 
to  the  Colossians  —  I  am  not  sure  whether  it  was  St.  Paul,  but 
at  any  rate  he  writes  in  the  vein  of  St.  Paul's  later  years  — 
described  this  as  "the  mystery  which  hath  been  hid  from  ages 
and  from  generations,  but  now  is  made  manifest  to  his  saints; 
.  .  .  which  is  Christ  in  you,  the  hope  of  glory."  The  two 
epistles  to  the  Colossians  and  the  Ephesians  say  a  good  deal 
about  this  mystery;  out  of  twenty-six  or  twenty-seven  occur- 
rences of  the  word  in  the  New  Testament  ten  are  in  these  two 
short  letters.  A  mystery,  in  the  apostle's  view,  is  something 
which  has  always  existed,  being  as  essential  to  humanity  as 
anything  however  clear,  but  it  has  only  now  come  to  light, 
only  now  have  the  elements  been  supplied  for  the  comprehen- 
sion of  it.  And  this  mystery  is  the  mystery  of  Christ  in  us. 
In  whom?  The  writer  speaks  as  the  apostle  to  the  Gentiles; 
and  repeatedly  he  speaks  with  wonder  of  the  fact  that  the 
Gentiles  —  the  word,  you  know,  is  the  same  that  is  used  to 
designate  the  heathen  —  show  just  as  authentic  marks  of  its 
presence  as  do  the  Jews;  the  possession  of  it  breaks  down  the 
walls  be-tween  the  nations  and  the  ages,  and  puts  all  men  in 
one  great  united  family.  In  other  words,  this  mystery  of 
Christ  in  us,  now  unveiled,  is  something  that  belongs  to  man 
as  man,  and  to  the  man  of  all  time  past  and  to  come.  Not 
it,  but  just  the  unveiling  of  it,  is  the  distinction  of  the  Chris- 
tian dispensation;  it  was  really  there  in  man  always;  Christ 
was  there,  away  back  in  the  ages,  a  dim  pulsation  of  manhood, 
and  men  did  not  know  it.  And  if  Christ  in  us  is  the  hope  of 
glory  now,  so  He  was  then;  Jesus  Christ,  the  same  yesterday, 
and  to-day,  and  for  ever.  This  is  only  another  way,  you  see, 
of  describing  the  coming  of  life  and  immortality  to  light;  our 
large  question,  as  I  said  earlier,  is  not  when  all  this  began  to 
be  a  fact,  but  when  and  how  it  was  revealed  so  that  men  might 
know  what  was  all  the  while  in  them,  and  might  act  intelli- 


322  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

gently  upon  it.  It  has  come  out  into  the  light,  so  that  we  can 
give  it  a  name,  and  note  its  vital  elements,  and  commit  our 
spirits  to  it;  but  it  was  always  there,  ever  since  the  spirit 
moved  on  the  face  of  the  waters,  and  in  its  growing  illumina- 
tive power  we  have  been  led  hither.  Why,  the  soul  of  proph- 
ecy was  Christ  in  men;  you  recall  how  St.  Peter  dwells  on  that 
picture  of  the  prophets  searching  with  wonder  what  the  spirit 
of  Christ  which  was  in  them  did  signify,  and  trying  to  find  a 
time  where  suffering  and  sacrifice  would  fit  in,  as  they  looked 
toward  that  which  was  to  be.  The  very  sustenance  and  re- 
freshment of  the  wilderness  journey,  according  to  St.  Paul's 
allegorical  account,  was  Christ;  "they  drank  of  that  spiritual 
Rock  which  followed  them:  and  that  Rock  was  Christ."  This 
diffused  universality  of  the  spirit  of  Christ  is  a  great  discovery 
to  make;  even  though  the  mystery  has  been  unveiled  so  long 
we  are  ourselves  slow  to  acknowledge  it;  and  how  many  there 
are  to-day  who,  like  these  disciples  who  wanted  to  call  down 
fire  from  heaven,  know  not  even  yet  what  manner  of  spirit 
they  are  of. 

If  this  mystery  is  so  permanent  and  wide-spread  there  must 
be  many  ways  in  which  Christ  may  be  in  manhood;  or  rather 
perhaps  one  way,  when  we  get  down  to  it,  but  under  multi- 
tudinous conditions  and  combinations.  It  would  be  hazardous 
for  any  of  us  to  say  where  He  is  not,  or  to  measure  out  just 
how  much  or  how  little  there  is  of  Him  in  our  neighbor's  soul ; 
for  there  are  last  that  shall  be  first.  About  as  safe  a  way  for 
us  as  any,  perhaps,  is  to  fall  back  on  the  aged  St.  Paul's  judg- 
ment, as  he  saw  his  time  so  filled  with  heresies,  "Nevertheless 
the  foundation  of  God  standeth  sure,  having  this  seal,  The 
Lord  knoweth  them  that  are  his."  Of  this  we  must  say  more 
later;  but  here  for  a  few  moments  we  must  note  the  historical 
movement  by  which  this  mystery  of  Christ  in  man  was  gradu- 
ally unveiled. 

All  along  it  has  been  the  scripture  way  to  spell  the  secrets 
of  life  out  in  concrete  facts,  which  men  may  see  and  handle; 
and  when  the  meaning  and  power  of  the  fact  strikes  in,  so  as 
to  be  a  source  of  motive  and  wisdom  in  man,  then  the  crutch 


INVENTORY  OF   VITAL   VALUES          323 

of  outward  sense  is  removed.  This  applies  to  the  whole  life 
and  ministry  of  Christ,  the  Life  Indeed.  And  when  resurrec- 
tion had  set  the  supreme  seal  on  His  life,  there  is  to  be  noted 
the  very  remarkable  way  in  which  this  support  of  sense  was 
removed  gradually,  as  common  men  could  bear  it,  and  in  its 
place  gradually  substituted  the  inner  light  and  power  of  the 
spirit.  All  this  was  done  in  such  condescension  of  love,  was 
so  in  the  tender  character  of  Christ,  that  it  carries  its  truth 
on  the  face  of  it;  no  mind  short  of  Christ's  could  have  in- 
vented it.  "Such  ever  was  love's  way;  to  rise  it  stoops."  The 
body  that  came  from  our  Lord's  tomb,  you  remember,  had 
something  very  strange  about  it.  It  seemed  of  this  earth,  yet 
not  of  this  earth;  seemed  to  be  endowed  with  mysterious  re- 
versed powers.  As  some  one  has  described  it,  "what  was 
natural  to  him  before  seems  now  miraculous;  what  was  before 
miraculous  is  now  natural."  Though  He  had  lain  there  only 
three  days,  yet  His  nearest  disciples  did  not  recognize  Him 
at  first;  and  in  each  case  of  recognition  they  had  to  have  a 
preparation  of  mind,  of  awakening  spirit,  in  order  to  identify 
Him  at  all.  The  journey  of  the  two  disciples  to  Emmaus  is 
typical  in  this  regard;  wherein  He  walked  with  them  several 
miles  as  a  stranger,  making  their  hearts  burn  within  them  as 
He  opened  the  Scriptures  to  them,  before  they  knew  Him  by 
the  familiar  act  of  breaking  bread.  He  stands  suddenly  in  the 
midst  of  a  company;  He  vanishes  as  suddenly.  There  are 
various  minds  to  be  convinced,  various  degrees  of  faith  to  be 
supported;  and  so  He  submits  to  the  tests  fitted  to  each,  shows 
the  wounds  and  lets  them  touch  Him;  though  to  the  first  one 
who  saw  Him  He  warned  "Touch  me  not."  Even  the  incident 
of  the  empty  tomb,  seeming  to  prove  that  the  material  body 
had  been  transformed  into  a  body  immaterial,  was  in  the  line 
of  necessary  identification;  it  was  for  their  and  the  world's 
sake,  however,  inexplicable;  and  at  any  rate  it  demonstrated 
the  absolute  ascendency  of  spirit  over  matter.  But  all  this, 
we  may  fairly  say,  this  reestablished  materialization,  belonged 
to  the  uniqueness  of  the  event;  it  was  an  individual  phe- 
nomenon, like  all  His  miracles,  whereby  love  wrought  its  pur- 


324  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

pose  of  showing  resurrection  to  be  real;  not,  however,  intended 
to  reveal  a  species  phenomenon.  The  resurrection  of  the  body 
is  not  the  same  as  the  resurrection  of  matter;  we  must  learn 
to  separate  the  two  in  our  minds.  There  is  a  spiritual  body, 
St.  Paul  says;  but  flesh  and  blood  cannot  inherit  the  kingdom 
of  God.  It  was  this  mystery,  both  sides  of  it,  that  our  Lord's 
strange  forty  days  after  resurrection  would  demonstrate;  He 
would  show  them  that  the  spiritual  body  is  both  a  body,  not 
a  naked  essence,  and  spiritual,  not  material;  and  to  show  it 
He  began,  so  to  say,  at  the  material  pole,  and  working  step 
by  step,  as  they  could  comprehend  it,  toward  the  spiritual  pole, 
at  the  end  had  so  accustomed  them  to  the  tremendous  new 
truth,  that  when  He  was  finally  parted  from  them,  never  to 
submit  to  such  testing  any  more,  they  returned  to  Jerusalem 
with  great  joy.  There  is  a  gradation  observable  here  too.  To 
have  recognized  Him  once,  by  a  crude  test,  was  no  guarantee 
that  they  would  recognize  Him  at  the  next  appearing.  The 
succeeding  test  was  apparently  less  material,  finer,  requiring 
an  advance  in  spiritual  perception;  so  that,  though  on  that 
first  appearance  in  Jerusalem  they  were  affrighted  and  needed 
reproach  for  their  hardness  of  heart  in  doubting  His  identity, 
on  the  later  appearance  at  the  sea  of  Tiberias,  where  all  was 
like  a  restored  companionship  and  joy,  "none  of  the  disciples 
durst  ask  him,  Who  art  thou?  knowing  that  it  was  the  Lord." 
It  looks  like  a  divinely  adapted  advance  toward  the  point 
where  the  crutch  of  sense  and  material  apprehension  could  be 
removed,  and  their  Master  could  be  to  them  a  Reality  appre- 
hended purely  by  the  spirit.  Those  forty  days  were  the  stages 
of  a  transition. 

Nor  was  this  the  end.  The  next  step  of  manifestation, 
though  now  spiritual,  began  even  yet  at  a  kind  of  physical 
pole,  according  to  what  they  could  apprehend,  though  in  the 
physical  phenomenon  least  suggestive  of  matter.  A  week  after 
His  ascension,  you  remember,  when  the  day  of  Pentecost  was 
fully  come,  the  Spirit  filled  the  house  with  the  sound  as  of  a 
rushing  mighty  wind,  and  became  visible  in  tongues  of  flame. 
Perhaps  this  too  was  a  concession  to  the  simple  conceptions  of 


INVENTORY  OF   VITAL   VALUES  325 

the  time;  the  Jewish  mind  craved  a  sign;  and  perhaps  such 
a  sign  was  necessary  to  authenticate  the  strange  new  enthu- 
siasm and  power  that  endued  them  all  at  once.  They  must 
know  and  identify  the  source  of  their  new  access  of  life;  so 
that  with  full  assurance  they  could  say  to  believers  and  gain- 
sayers,  "This  Jesus  hath  God  raised  up,  whereof  we  all  are 
witnesses.  Therefore  being  by  the  right  hand  of  God  exalted, 
and  having  received  of  the  Father  the  promise  of  the  Holy 
Ghost,  he  hath  shed  forth  this,  which  ye  now  see  and  hear." 
But  this  too,  with  its  train  of  marvelous  spiritual  gifts,  was 
only  a  step  in  the  process  whereby  the  mystery  of  Christ  in 
man,  the  hope  of  glory,  was  revealed.  The  mystic  splendor 
faded  into  the  light  of  common  day;  but  let  us  guard  our 
thoughts  against  deeming  the  spiritual  endowment,  by  being 
diffused  through  all  our  prosaic  duties  and  deeds,  became  less 
real;  it  became  even  more  real,  more  essentially  available,  by 
becoming  more  purely  spiritual,  and  depending  not  at  all  on 
the  support  of  sense.  "Eye  hath  not  seen,  nor  ear  heard, 
neither  have  entered  into  the  heart  of  man,  the  things  which 
God  hath  prepared  for  them  that  love  him.  God  hath  revealed 
them  unto  us  by  his  Spirit:  for  the  Spirit  searcheth  all  things, 
yea,  the  deep  things  of  God."  These  words  of  St.  Paul  do  not 
refer,  at  least  primarily,  to  heaven;  they  refer  to  the  light  that 
is  shed  abroad  by  the  felt  and  obeyed  presence  of  Christ  in  us. 
We  will  remember  that  the  Jew  interpreted  his  life  accord- 
ing to  what  we  are  pleased  to  call  an  antiquated  psychology. 
In  all  his  times  of  health  and  disease,  and  in  all  unusual  ex- 
periences, he  was  open  to  the  influence  or  subject  to  the  inva- 
sion of  spirits.  A  man  who  was  insane  was  in  his  idea 
possessed  by  a  demon;  an  alien  personality  had  usurped  his 
will  and  consciousness;  you  remember  how  many  times  Jesus 
conformed  his  cures  to  this  psychological  idea,  and  how  the 
demons  themselves,  if  there  were  such,  obeyed  His  behest  ac- 
cording to  the  same  psychology.  So  also  to  the  Jew  the  world 
unseen  was  practically  the  world  of  the  air;  and  this  was 
peopled  with  spiritual  beings  with  whom  in  various  ways  our 
life  had  relations:  there  were  angels,  with  their  orders  and 


326  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

hierarchies,  who  were  employed  as  ministering  spirits  sent 
forth  to  aid  those  who  should  be  heirs  of  salvation;  there  was 
an  evil  power  of  the  air,  with  its  prince,  a  spirit  working  in 
the  children  of  disobedience;  there  were  principalities  and 
powers,  spiritual  wickedness  in  high  places,  against  which  as 
by  hand  to  hand  fight  it  was  the  Christian's  business  to  wrestle. 
All  the  inner  operations  and  relations  of  life  were  thus,  as  the 
philosophers  say,  objectified;  not  merely  personified,  like  po- 
etic figures,  but  conceived  in  terms  of  actual  living  personality, 
of  unseen  impulses  and  wills  capable  of  impact  on  us,  as  we 
act  on  one  another.  There  was  a  quasi  physical  and  material 
quality  in  their  idea,  too,  quite  foreign  to  our  ways  of  thinking: 
the  spirit  of  God  was  the  breath  of  God;  the  spirit  of  evil  was 
as  it  were  a  crazing  and  miasmatic  atmosphere  working  havoc 
in  men's  lives.  When  Jesus  met  His  disciples  after  the  resur- 
rection, and  gave  them  their  commission  for  the  time  to  come, 
He  breathed  on  them  and  said,  " Receive  ye  the  Holy  Spirit." 
We  have  just  noted,  too,  the  phenomena  that  accompanied  the 
coming  of  the  Spirit  at  Pentecost,  the  sound  as  of  a  rushing 
mighty  wind  and  the  tongues  of  flame.  The  effects  were 
correspondingly  marked  and  visible.  Mockers  attributed  these 
to  new  wine;  and  Peter  took  pains  to  tell  them  that  it  was 
too  early  in  the  day  for  these  strangely  exhilarated  men  to  be 
drunk;  nay,  later  in  the  history  of  the  intensified  new  life 
that  had  come  to  men,  St.  Paul  is  careful  to  separate  its  means 
and  origin  from  analogous  physical  inducing  means;  "Be  not 
drunk  with  wine,"  he  says,  "wherein  is  excess,  but  be  ye  filled 
with  the  Spirit."  Even  in  modern  revival  efforts  men  speak 
in  the  same  psychological  idiom;  they  pray  for  spiritual  out- 
pouring, as  if  somehow  there  were  a  vital  fluid  out  in  space,  or 
in  the  region  just  above  our  heads,  which  in  a  way  transcend- 
ing our  initiative,  may  come  in  to  flood  us  with  exhilaration 
and  enhanced  joy  and  energy.  It  is  as  good  a  conception  as 
any,  the  best  perhaps,  for  the  common  unmetaphysical  mind 
to  approach  the  source  of  its  highest  life;  infinitely  better, 
surely,  than  to  suffer  a  modern  psychological  abstraction  to 
fade  it  away  into  nothing  at  all.  There  is  a  holy  power  not 


IN7ENTORT  OF   VITAL   FALUES  327 

ourselves  to  be  accounted  for  and  reckoned  with;  it  must  not 
only  be  ours,  but  be  translated  into  our  ways  of  thinking;  but 
it  must  not  be  denied  and  evaporated  in  the  process. 

I  have  already  spoken,  in  an  earlier  chapter,  of  that  won- 
derful providential  guidance  by  which,  all  through  the  twilight 
period  of  growth,  the  Jewish  mind,  surrounded  though  it  was 
by  nations  given  over  to  necromancy  and  demon  worship  and 
all  the  uncanny  inquiry  of  the  occult,  would  never  submit  it- 
self passively  to  the  invasion  of  spirits  through  mediumship 
and  vulgar  psychic  hypnotization.  To  study  the  reason  of 
this  in  detail  would  be  well  worth  while,  but  of  course  we  can- 
not go  into  it  here.  I  think  one  reason  was  because  the  Jewish 
spirit  and  genius  could  never  consent  to  be  a  passive  thing, 
helplessly  acted  upon  from  without;  it  cooperated  vigorously 
and  intelligently  with  its  unseen  influences ;  it  insisted  that  the 
spirits  of  the  prophets  be  subject  to  the  prophets;  and  the 
Holy  Spirit  that  it  would  call  to  its  aid  was  conceived  as  a 
spirit  bearing  witness  with  our  spirits,  thus  meeting  us  on 
common  intelligent  ground.  Besides,  there  was  its  growing 
clarifying  idea  of  God,  the  great  Reality,  which  idea  must  at 
every  step  be  identified  with  authentic  realities,  revealing  a 
glory,  a  splendor,  which  however  transcendent  must  be  recog- 
nized as  true  to  our  highest  ideals.  This  produced  a  spiritual 
disdain  for  those  dim  uncertain  underworld  phenomena,  what- 
ever they  were,  that  invaded  the  colorless  passive  mind  of  the 
medium;  the  grand  heritage  of  his  religion  and  his  practical 
wisdom,  beginning  with  the  reverent  fear  of  God,  had  made 
these  things  antipathetic  to  him.  So  when  the  time  came  for 
the  long  hidden  mystery  to  be  unveiled,  the  mystery  of  Christ 
in  us  the  hope  of  glory,  his  mind  in  spite  of  its  now  antiquated 
psychology,  or  perhaps  indeed  by  reason  of  it,  was  already 
well  educated,  both  negatively  and  positively,  to  apprehend 
it  and  act  upon  it  as  it  essentially  is.  And  on  it  our  more  scien- 
tific conceptions  may  safely  build;  there  is  nothing  in  it  to 
make  succeeding  ideas  of  life  and  spirit  other  than  true  and 
wholesome. 

When  therefore  we  try  to  realize  the  truth  of  Christ  in  us, 


328  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

our  honest  way  to  deal  with  it  is  to  translate  it  into  our  own 
psychological  terms,  thus  completing  the  transition  that  was 
begun  at  Ascension  and  Pentecost.  If  it  has  become  alien  to 
our  sense  of  reality  to  think  of  that  human  Person  who  was 
born  at  Bethlehem  and  died  at  Calvary  as  now  somehow  dis- 
tributed through  the  world,  as  a  diffusive  power  or  pulsation, 
like  electricity  or  light  or  magnetism,  it  is  at  least  open  to  us 
to  think  what  there  is  in  men  who  pay  homage  to  Christ  to- 
day, what  spirit  there  is  now  potent  which,  because  it  unites 
us  in  a  common  joy  and  a  common  hope,  traces  back  its  origin 
and  illumination  to  Him.  There  are  not  wanting  abundant 
analogies  to  help  us.  We  can  think  of  the  wave  of  reform  and 
new  faith  that  swept  over  the  hearts  of  men  when  Luther  made 
his  brave  stand  against  the  paralyzing  errors  of  his  time;  we 
can  think  how  Napoleon's  personality  had  in  it  a  power  to  in- 
spire and  characterize  an  army  and  a  period  of  history;  we 
can  think  how  a  mighty  spirit  of  patriotism  and  hatred  of 
slavery  was  diffused  through  the  North  in  our  Civil  War,  mak- 
ing the  people  for  a  time  one  will,  and  bringing  an  enlargement 
of  life  and  being  which  still  exists  in  power.  All  these  in- 
stances show  what  potencies  slumber  in  manhood,  waiting  only 
the  illuminative  word  and  the  fitting  time  to  call  them  forth 
into  energy;  and  what  a  perpetual  hope  of  better  things  the 
successively  awakening  potencies  are.  Such  facts  are  the 
commonplaces  of  history.  Can  we  not  think  back  from  these 
to  the  origin  and  concentrated  potency  of  them  all;  to  the  light 
which  shone  when  Hope  itself  was  born?  We  nucleate  them  in 
the  name  Christ;  in  Him  these  various  potencies,  the  prophecy 
of  progress  to  better  things,  become  concrete,  elements  of  a 
large  world  personality,  a  spirit  which  we  can  name  and  define. 
The  sum  total  of  this  spirit  we  call  the  Holy  Spirit;  which,  in 
one  true  sense  at  least,  is,  as  was  said  earlier  in  our  studies, 
the  spirit  of  wholeness,  soundness,  the  whole  man  now  brought 
to  light  in  a  typical  Personality,  and  demonstrating  His  whole- 
ness by  the  finished  work  He  did.  This  wholeness  of  manhood 
within  us,  redeemed  from  the  sin  and  error  and  bondage  of 
man's  twilight  stratum  of  being,  set  free  at  last  to  work  his 


INVENTORY  OF   VITAL   VALUES  329 

regenerate  will  on  himself  and  the  world,  is  our  hope  of  glory. 
It  existed  there,  in  a  dim  mystery  and  onward  spiritual  surge, 
from  the  beginning;  the  potentiality  of  wholeness,  health, 
eventual  maturity  was  an  unrest  and  a  prophecy  through  all 
those  dim  years;  and  now  that  its  true  centre  and  principle  is 
revealed,  it  has  become  a  great  rest  and  peace  in  us,  yet  also 
an  energizing  spur  to  larger,  purer  things,  forbidding  us  to 
call  any  earthly  thing  our  rest,  or  cramp  our  souls  to  it,  and 
a  perpetual  prophecy  of  things  that  have  not  yet  entered  into 
the  heart  of  man.  This  is  Christ  in  us;  this  our  modern  no- 
tions of  mind  and  spirit  can  appropriate.  If  we  can  no  longer 
take  it  as  breath  and  flame  and  an  outpoured  fluid,  we  can 
commit  ourselves  in  strong  abandon  of  faith  to  the  wholeness 
of  manhood,  and  to  the  supreme  principle  which  sums  up  and 
unifies  its  maturity;  can  resolve  to  live  the  life  of  goodwill 
and  good  works  and  sacrifice  which,  in  one  divine  Person,  has 
so  demonstrated  its  fulness  and  power.  This  is  Christ  in  us; 
this  is  the  same  yesterday  and  to-day  and  for  ever;  this  makes 
the  ideal  of  our  being,  however  high  our  evolution  puts  it,  not 
an  unattainable  despair  but  a  lively  hope. 

It  is  our  inveterate  tendency  to  confuse  our  hope  and  the 
hope  of  our  neighbor  by  applying  some  other  standard  than 
this  to  our  destiny;  and  especially  the  older  standard  of  legal 
morality  and  sinlessness  which  Jesus  and  the  apostles  have 
so  labored  to  make  us  outgrow.  A  strong  vein  of  the  Jew  is 
in  all  of  us,  perhaps  indeed  ought  to  be  until  that  current  of 
duty  is  worked  clear.  We  tremblingly  ask,  Am  I  good  enough 
to  be  saved?  knowing  all  the  while  that  we  are  not,  and  indeed 
that  salvation  by  the  Pharisee  way,  the  works  of  the  law,  is 
impossible.  Then  we  turn  to  our  neighbor,  perhaps  in  disgust 
and  bitter  disdain,  and  say,  Can  that  degraded,  unlovely,  de- 
praved, heathenish  man  enter  heaven?  and  sometimes,  in  our 
American  way  of  joking  we  say  that  if  he  is  going  there,  on 
the  strength  of  salvation  wrought  for  him  by  faith  and  the 
church,  we  prefer  to  go  where  we  can  have  more  congenial 
company.  But  most  of  us  still  shiver  over  the  question  in 
sadness  and  doubt.  "Lord,  are  there  few  that  be  saved?"  the 


330  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

disciples  once  asked  Jesus,  when  they  still  had  only  their  old 
law  of  works  and  prescription  to  measure  by.  His  answer, 
accommodated  to  their  idiom,  was,  " Strive  to  enter  in  at  the 
strait  gate,  for  many  shall  seek  to  enter  in  and  shall  not  be 
able."  The  old  law  of  destiny  is  inexorable:  it  opens  inevit- 
ably that  sombre  picture  of  two  roads,  the  broad  one,  populous 
and  crowded,  leading  to  destruction,  and  the  narrow  one,  with 
only  here  and  there  a  traveler,  leading  to  life.  And  our  Lord's 
word  virtually  is,  If  that  is  your  accepted  standard  of  life, 
strive  to  obey  the  strictest,  straitest,  most  strenuous  condition 
that  you  can  see  imposed  on  you;  you  will  be  none  too  sound 
and  safe  then;  don't  fear  that  you  will  do  too  much,  or  live 
too  ideal  a  life.  But  at  the  same  time  He  says  that  many  of 
whose  salvation  they  have  not  dreamed  shall  come  from  the 
north  and  the  south  and  the  east  and  the  west  and  sit  with 
the  spirits  of  the  just  made  perfect  in  the  kingdom  of  heaven. 
And  then,  going  on  in  His  ministry,  He  made  the  strangest, 
most  revolutionary  recognitions  of  the  powers  of  life:  ate  and 
drank  with  publicans  and  sinners;  while  He  pronounced  woe 
on  the  hypocritical  Pharisees,  pronounced  the  word  of  salva- 
tion on  Zaccheus  the  publican;  and  even  on  the  abandoned 
woman  who  had  fallen  a  victim  to  her  trust  in  human  love 
and  fidelity,  He  pronounced  the  word  of  hope:  "Her  sins, 
which  are  many,  are  forgiven,  for  she  loved  much."  Here  is 
the  new  standard  of  living,  the  standard  of  love,  which,  though 
capable  of  the  lowest  depths  of  abuse,  is  also  capable  of  the 
highest  things,  being,  when  followed  by  the  committal  of  faith 
and  wisdom,  by  the  truest  that  is  in  us,  the  pulsation  of  the 
love  that  broods  over  all  the  world,  in  fatherhood,  and  sonship, 
and  the  communion  of  the  spirit.  It  is  this  pulsation  of  love 
that  He  would  call  out  from  its  dimness  and  slumber,  and  free 
from  selfish,  degrading  elements,  and  naturalize  in  the  universal 
heart  of  man.  The  apostles  took  up  the  same  endeavor,  and 
stated  it  in  its  principle:  "By  grace  are  ye  saved,  through  faith, 
and  that  not  of  yourselves;  it  is  the  gift  of  God;  not  of  works, 
lest  any  man  should  boast."  We  read  this  one-sidedly,  as  if 
it  were  our  business,  as  candidates  for  salvation,  to  be  merely 


INVENTORY  OF  VITAL   VALUES  331 

receivers  and  beneficiaries  of  the  free  gift,  and  as  if,  having 
received  it,  we  were  only  to  gloat  over  what  we  have  secured. 
But  grace  within  us,  the  free  giving  impulse  of  love,  is  still 
grace;  it  is  not  transformed  into  its  opposite;  our  faith  in  it, 
our  venture  of  life  upon  it,  makes  us  henceforth  instrumen- 
talities of  it,  the  vehicles  of  that  same  overflow  of  life  to  the 
world.  And  this  is  to  have  Christ  in  us;  this  it  was  that  He 
wrought  out  consistently,  though  identified  with  the  poor  and 
the  publicans  and  the  harlots  and  the  malefactors,  going  down 
to  the  degraded  depths  of  humanity,  in  order  to  show  how 
from  the  lowest  the  way  of  vitalizing,  redeeming  love  is  open 
to  all.  It  was  a  veritable  release  of  the  soul  of  man  from  his 
prison-house  of  law  and  prescription,  which  without  love  to 
illuminate  it,  must  remain  an  ever-increasing  bondage.  But 
now  we  have  a  new  standard  whereby  to  judge  our  neighbor. 
We  must  allow  for  the  fact  that  it  is  the  boast  of  grace  to  enter 
and  take  up  its  abode  in  the  unlikeliest  places.  A  heart  almost 
all  degraded  may  still  respond,  for  the  sake  of  wife  or  family 
or  comrade  or  a  world  in  peril,  to  the  unselfish  prompting  of 
love;  may  even  lay  down  life,  when  the  stress  comes,  for  the 
sake  of  a  good  which,  so  far  as  his  body  is  concerned,  may  be 
his  sacrifice.  We  cannot  tell.  The  Lord  knoweth  them  that 
are  His.  That  degraded  man  may  at  some  point  have  laid 
hold,  in  a  blind  faith,  on  the  love  of  God,  and  made  it  operative 
in  love  of  neighbor.  Well,  then  Christ  is  in  him,  the  essential 
Christ,  the  diffused  spirit  of  life;  and  no  knowing  how  slender 
a  pulsation,  seemingly,  may  have  in  it  the  seminal  power  to 
grow,  and  redeem  his  heritage  or  education  of  sin,  and 
make  his  essential  being  new,  and  so  be,  in  the  long  run,  his 
full  salvation.  For  this  reason  it  is  hazardous  to  judge  men 
on  mere  moral  lines;  we  must  rather  know  the  amount  of  love 
and  faith  that  is  in  them  than  the  amount  of  works.  "Not 
of  works,  lest  any  man  should  boast."  Equally  inconclusive 
is  it  to  erect  a  standard  of  vital  judgment  which  excludes  from 
any  chance  of  life  those,  like  depraved  criminals,  whose  wills 
are  diseased,  or,  like  idiots,  whose  mind  is  undeveloped,  or, 
like  infants,  who  have  not  come  to  understanding.  All  these 


332  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

are  hard  problems  to  a  moral  and  legalized  standard  of  judg- 
ment; we  cannot  force  the  great  world-current  of  life  through 
such  narrow  channels.  Nor  can  I  stay  to  speak  of  those 
whose  vision  of  life  is  not  yet  universalized  and  clarified:  of 
those  myopic  souls  whose  impulse  of  love  cannot  get  beyond 
their  family  or  parish;  of  those  color-blind  souls  who  in  their 
devotion  to  a  philanthropy  or  a  dogmatic  system  can  be  harsh 
or  intolerant  toward  those  whose  love  works  in  narrower  or 
strange  bounds.  There  is  doubtless  something  in  all  of  us 
which  some  time  or  other  will  need  to  be  straightened  or  en- 
larged or  corrected.  It  is  a  long  process  to  get,  as  Scripture 
phrases  it,  Christ  formed  within  us;  I  am  not  sure  that  this 
earthly  existence  of  ours  is  going  to  suffice,  even  for  us  who 
have  all  the  experience  of  the  past  to  learn  by.  We  cannot  tell ; 
but  meanwhile  let  us  take  comfort  that  the  mysterious  power 
of  growth  and  sacrifice  has  been  working  in  man  from  the 
beginning;  that  the  Lamb  was  slain  from  the  foundation  of 
the  world;  and  that  both  we  and  our  neighbor  have  eternity 
to  grow  in.  We  have  also  in  us  that  wonderful  power  of  rec- 
ognizing according  to  the  love  that  is  in  us,  rather  than  accord- 
ing to  the  theorized  merit  that  is  in  others;  on  this  our 
judgment  hangs.  If  we  do  not  cultivate  this,  the  Helper  when 
He  comes  may  convict  us  of  sin,  because  we  believe  not  on 
Christ.  It  resolves  itself  in  this,  after  all,  the  mystery  of 
Christ  in  us  is  the  bearing  of  our  whole  weight  on  the  perfect 
loving  manhood  that  through  so  marvelous  a  history  of  the 
spirit  is  revealed  as  the  one  way  of  manhood  life. 

II.      THOUGH    OUR    OUTWARD    MAN    PERISH 

The  cry  that  for  several  decades  has  dominated  the  religious 
sentiment  of  our  age  and  land  is,  We  don't  want  theories,  we 
want  facts.  It  is  a  wholesome  plea;  it  lays  hold  of  the  ele- 
ments of  hope,  reality,  promise.  But  like  all  popular  senti- 
ments, it  is  as  shallow  as  it  is  deep;  that  is,  it  may  be  shallow 
or  deep,  according  to  the  spirit  in  which  it  is  held.  The  nega- 
tive side  of  the  plea,  we  don't  want  theory,  or  as  men  have 


INVENTORY  OF  VITAL   VALUES  333 

been  pleased  to  dub  it,  we  don't  want  dogma,  is,  and  for 
decades  has  been,  a  very  shallow  thing,  and  not  without  bad 
effects,  as  must  be  the  case  with  everything  superficial.  It 
has  done  much  to  empty  our  churches,  to  discredit  the  noble 
profession  of  the  Christian  ministry,  and  in  general  to  pitch 
the  life  of  the  rank  and  file  in  a  low  key.  Perhaps  indeed  the 
ministry  itself,  the  country  through,  has  not  remained  wholly 
untouched  by  it;  perhaps  the  ambassadors  of  Christ  have 
sometimes  let  their  high  credentials  go  under  partial  eclipse, 
while  in  their  endeavor  to  make  their  message  popular  and 
workable  they  have  played  too  much  to  the  galleries.  After 
all,  ministers  have  a  good  deal  of  human  nature  in  them;  they 
are  not  so  far  beyond  us  but  that  we  of  the  rank  and  file  can 
still  keep  them  in  sight  and  judge  them;  besides,  it  is  not  our 
business  to  sit  in  judgment  on  them,  or  anybody,  but  rather 
to  draw  our  own  views  of  life  from  the  same  Word  that  is  sup- 
posedly in  them.  This  shallow  plea,  then,  comes  back  just  as 
straight  to  us  as  it  does  to  them;  the  Word  is  nigh  us,  in  our 
mouth  and  in  our  heart;  and  if  we  have  not  the  teaching  office 
in  our  hands,  we  have  in  our  keeping  the  general  level  of  faith, 
and  are  alone  responsible  for  its  being  high  or  low.  Now  this 
cry,  we  don't  want  theory,  pitches  our  faith  low;  it  opens  the 
door  to  all  those  lazy,  easy-going,  drifting  people  who  hate 
to  think  and  want  to  get  into  some  instinctive  sort  of  life  that 
shall  merely  run  itself.  So  it  brings  about,  if  we  are  not  heed- 
ful, an  unspoken  ideal  of  Christian  living  as  if  it  were  not  an 
arena  where  we  must  fight  for  what  we  get,  or  run  a  strenuous 
race  for  a  prize,  but  rather  a  nice  soft  bed  where  we  can  lie 
and  rest,  with  the  comfortable  feeling  that  we  have  a  ticket 
for  heaven  under  our  pillow.  I  suspect,  however,  that  the 
real  meaning  of  this  shallow  plea  is  not  that  we  don't  want 
theory,  but  that  we  don't  want  the  theory  that  we  have  in- 
herited from  Augustine  and  Calvin  and  Jonathan  Edwards; 
and  the  trouble  is  that  too  many  have  let  it  go  at  that,  without 
troubling  themselves  to  inquire  what  they  do  want.  For  the 
fact  is,  we  cannot  very  well  believe  without  believing  some- 
thing; so  if  we  too  lightly  abjure  theory,  which  is  only  an- 


334  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

other  name  for  theology  or  dogma,  the  alternative  is  apt  to 
turn  out  no  faith,  no  really  grounded  character,  at  all;  and 
in  the  end  the  plea  of  less  theology  and  more  religion  issues 
inevitably  in  less  religion,  in  a  sort  of  vanishing  quantity.  It 
is  but  another  example  of  what  I  have  so  many  times  spoken 
of:  the  evil  effect  of  taking  up  with  the  negative  side  of  an 
ideal,  and  letting  the  positive  side  go.  I  don't  believe  in  nega- 
tives: they  are  good  for  nothing  under  the  sun  but  just  pur- 
poses of  definition,  they  only  show  where  the  real  thing,  the 
positive  truth,  begins,  and  our  concern  is  to  leave  them  behind 
and  thenceforth  ignore  them. 

It  is  false  and  shallow,  then,  to  say  we  don't  want  theory. 
We  do  want  theory;  we  want  all  we  can  get,  we  must  have  it, 
if  we  are  going  to  live  our  lives  in  any  sort  of  order  and  prin- 
ciple. If  we  have  faith  in  God,  we  must  have  a  theory  of  God, 
a  theology;  if  we  commit  ourselves  to  faith  in  man,  we  must 
have  a  theory  of  human  nature,  an  anthropology.  Our  theory 
may  not  be  articulated  into  all  the  minutiae  of  a  philosophical 
system,  but  it  must  be  real  and  have  a  basal  principle;  it  must 
be  what  we  call  a  working  theory.  The  Greek  word  from 
which  our  word  theory  is  derived  is  very  simple;  it  means  two 
things,  the  act  of  looking  at  a  thing,  and  the  thing  looked  at. 
According  to  its  connection  it  may  mean  either  of  these;  and 
we  need  both  of  them:  we  must  be  energetic  enough  to  look  and 
look  hard,  and  we  must  have  something  to  look  at  so  definite 
and  real  to  us  that  we  can  venture  life  and  destiny  upon  it. 
That  is  theory;  and  no  individual  of  us,  however  he  may  feel 
lost  in  the  crowd,  can  absolve  himself  from  this  obligation,  so 
long  as  he  has  an  active  and  intelligent  life  to  live. 

But  while  we  must  have  theories,  and  while  they  must  be  as 
searching  as  our  best  thinking  can  make  them,  we  certainly  do 
want  facts  too;  this  part  of  the  plea  is  strong  and  wholesome. 
It  is  the  facts,  the  actual  application  in  experience  and  prac- 
tice, that  test  our  theory.  This  is  only  another  way  of  saying 
that  in  order  to  be  good  for  anything  our  theory  must  prove 
itself  true  by  doing  what  it  promises  to  do.  And  if  one  theory 
does  not  work,  or  has  ceased  to  do  all  the  work  we  need  of 


INVENTORY  OF   VITAL    VALUES  335 

it,  we  do  not  mend  matters  by  throwing  up  the  game;  we  must 
try  another.  "By  their  fruits/'  was  our  Lord's  word,  "ye  shall 
know  them";  and  if  our  enlarged,  emancipate,  adult  life  craves 
fruits  which  the  old  theory  of  living  is  ill-adapted  or  inade- 
quate to  bear,  then  we  must  reconstruct  life  on  a  new  basis. 
But  a  basis  we  must  surely  have;  and  it  must  be  a  higher, 
roomier,  more  vital  basis  than  the  old;  for  there  are  greater 
fruits  to  grow  and  gather,  and  there  is  a  greater  manhood  field 
to  grow  them  in.  Men  are  awakening  to  this  truth  to-day; 
they  are  getting  sick  of  negatives  and  of  their  poverty  of  doc- 
trine. And  if  the  old  Puritanism,  which  practically  made 
Jews  of  them,  will  not  serve,  they  must  have  something  better; 
and  the  thoughtful  among  them  will  not,  in  their  desire  for  the 
better  thing,  think  scorn  of  the  old,  or  throw  it  heedlessly 
away  in  their  lazy  indisposition  to  think.  It  was  not  so  that 
the  early  disciples  did.  They  were  placed  in  a  precisely  analo- 
gous position  to  ours  of  to-day.  They  felt,  they  knew  by 
spiritual  insight,  that  the  old  regime,  the  heritage  of  many 
centuries,  was  decrepit  and  ready  to  vanish  away.  But  they 
were  not  unprepared  for  the  crisis:  they  already  had  a  new 
theory  of  life  which  not  only  more  than  took  the  place  of  the 
old,  but  retained  all  that  the  old  had  proved  sound  and  en- 
during. And  now  they  were  subjecting  the  new  to  the  test  of 
fact  and  experience.  Will  it  work?  was  their  question;  like 
the  life  of  Christ  when  it  was  first  lived,  so  now,  their  life,  on 
the  same  divine  lines,  was  a  colossal  experimentation,  a  kind 
of  laboratory  work  of  test  and  verification. 

Let  us  think  of  those  early  disciples,  then,  as  first  those 
simple-minded,  straight-minded  men,  like  Peter  and  John  and 
James  the  Lord's  brother,  whom  the  Bible  calls  "pure  in  heart," 
whose  minds  are  not  so  warped  by  prejudice  and  the  accumu- 
lations of  conventional  tradition  but  that  they  can  commit 
themselves  in  common-sense  clearness  to  the  new  vision  of  life 
that  their  Master  has  made  real  and  concrete;  then  secondly, 
as  added  to  these,  men  like  Paul  and  Apollos,  who  have  the 
culture  which  enables  them  to  cope  with  the  world's  ideas,  yet 
who  retain  through  it  all  the  same  singleness  and  consistent 


336  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

purity  of  heart,  enabling  them  to  translate  their  new  idiom 
of  life  into  a  workable  theory;  then  thirdly,  we  must  not  leave 
out,  as  the  most  significant  element  of  the  whole,  the  rank  and 
file  of  the  lay  disciples  and  members,  a  joyful  and  loving  body, 
who  if  they  cannot  think  deeply  can  at  least  lay  down  their 
lives,  and  cheerfully  bear  all  that  comes  surging  up  against 
them  from  whatever  quarter,  to  show  what  a  new  vital  prin- 
ciple can  accomplish  in  practical  living.  These,  after  all,  were 
the  test  and  proof  of  the  Christ  spirit;  they  were  the  witness 
bearers,  the  martyrs,  whose  blood  was  the  seed  of  the  church. 
We  have  not  their  thought  in  written  words,  nor  any  record 
of  their  mental  acumen,  but  their  lives  were  sown  in  the  brown 
earth,  like  their  Master's,  falling  into  the  ground  and  dying, 
that  a  great  harvest  might  in  time  spring  up  therefrom  and 
bear  much  fruit.  It  is  impossible  to  estimate  the  immense 
vital  value  that  came  to  the  world  from  the  freely  sacrificed 
lives  of  these  nameless  believers  in  the  power  of  the  new  life. 
Have  we  thought  of  it?  A  story  I  once  heard  may  help  us 
realize  it.  Two  men,  devout  clergymen  of  the  Church  of  Eng- 
land, were  once  earnestly  debating  together  about  the  first 
generations  of  Christians.  The  Church  of  England,  you  know, 
sets  great  store  by  the  Fathers;  thinks,  reasonably  enough, 
that  as  men  lived  nearer  to  Christ's  time  and  were  privileged 
to  walk  in  the  more  immediate  rays  of  His  presence,  their 
doctrine  must  have  been  purer,  their  lives  saintlier,  their  view 
of  divine  things  straighter  and  more  trustworthy.  But  one 
thing  greatly  disturbed  these  two  devout  men:  the  fact  that  no 
illustrious  name,  no  winged  word,  no  brilliant  achievement  of 
these  primitive  Christians  has  come  across  the  centuries  to 
us.  Not  a  single  notable  thing  that  they  did  is  on  record. 
Men  more  entirely  common  place  and  mediocre  than  the  im- 
mediate followers  and  successors  of  the  apostles  it  would  be 
hard  to  find;  and  the  century  in  which  they  lived  is  perhaps 
the  most  uninteresting  in  Christian  annals.  So  despite  their 
assumption  of  what  must  have  been,  these  two  pious  men  soon 
found  their  inquiry  reduced  to  the  simple  question,  What  were 
those  early  Christians  good  for?  Having  discussed  this  ques- 


INVENTORY  OF   VITAL   VALUES  337 

tion  till  late  at  night  without  reaching  any  satisfactory  con- 
clusion, the  friends  prayed  together  and  separated,  one  of  them 
setting  out  for  his  home  in  another  part  of  the  city.  As  he 
was  well  on  his  way,  however,  still  revolving  the  problem,  sud- 
denly the  answer  flashed  upon  him  like  an  inspiration;  and 
hastening  back  to  his  friend's  room  he  called  out  in  triumph, 
" I  have  it!  They  were  good  to  burn !"  I  think  you  will  agree 
with  me  that  the  answer  was  as  true  as  it  was  striking.  It 
reveals  to  us  the  most  tremendous  vital  value  in  the  world: 
men  in  whom  is  working  one  redeemed  and  quickened  spirit, 
the  unveiled  mystery  of  Christ  in  manhood;  and  these  were 
without  any  fuss  or  parade  just  living  the  life  and  dying  the 
death  of  their  Lord,  yielding  all  they  have  and  are  to  the  great 
Idea  that  has  come  to  vitalize  them.  And  if  it  had  not  been 
for  these,  what  fruits  of  Christianity  would  the  world  be 
noting  and  gathering  to-day?  Follow  out  those  nameless 
martyrdoms,  as  the  leaven  of  them  spread  from  heart  to  heart 
and  from  age  to  age,  and  mind  and  imagination  are  lost  in  the 
greatness  of  it. 

The  vital  value  that  we  noted  in  the  last  section  seemed  to  re- 
duce all  the  new  life  to  terms  of  spirit;  and  though  in  a  way 
we  are  becoming  aware  that  the  power  of  spirit  is  the  only  real 
power  we  can  trace  in  life,  yet  as  soon  as  we  name  the  word 
spirit,  our  idea  of  things  is  apt  to  dissipate  itself  into  some- 
thing vague,  shadowy,  unreal;  if  it  is  a  vibration,  like  mag- 
netism or  electricity,  it  is  a  vibration  whose  wave-lengths  and 
wave-contours  we  cannot  devise  instruments  to  measure.  It  ob- 
stinately refuses  to  express  itself  in  terms  of  mechanism;  and 
so  we  too  lightly  conclude  that  there  is  really  nothing  in  it. 
That  is  the  quarrel  that  our  materialistic  and  biological  science 
has  with  spirit,  and  you  see  it  is  simply  the  quarrel  that  it  has 
with  life  itself:  it  cannot  compute  the  curve  of  an  idea,  a  mo- 
tion, an  emancipated  will,  that  is  big  enough  to  fill  life  full, 
permeating  and  transforming  all  its  character  and  material 
energies,  without  giving  any  account  of  itself  except  its  own 
reality.  "The  wind  bloweth  where  it  listeth,  and  thou  hearest 
the  sound  thereof,  but  canst  not  tell  whence  it  cometh  and 


338  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

whither  it  goeth;  so  is  every  one  that  is  born  of  the  spirit." 
It  is  a  wholly  baffling  thing  until  we  consent  to  measure  it  in 
its  own  terms;  but  then  it  is  at  once  the  simplest  and  the 
deepest  thing  in  the  world. 

One  thing,  however,  we  must  not  leave  out,  and  it  is  the 
vital  value  that  forms  the  specific  subject  of  our  present  study. 
A  bad  result  of  our  prevailing  vagueness  of  conception  is  that 
we  are  apt  to  postpone  the  working  of  the  resurrection  spirit, 
relegating  it  to  some  unseen  realm  away  off  somewhere,  and 
to  some  indefinite  future,  while  we  leave  the  poor  body,  which 
for  the  purpose  we  have  separated  from  its  soul,  sickening  and 
decaying  and  dying  here.  We  have  given  scant  rights  to  our 
body;  it  is  a  thing  that,  because  we  go  at  it  in  the  wrong  way, 
we  really  understand  as  little  as  we  do  our  spirit.  So  according 
to  men's  disposition,  worldly  or  otherworldly,  they  either 
make  it  the  prey  of  lusts  and  luxuries,  with  their  grievous  en- 
tail of  disease  and  premature  mortality;  or  else,  treating  it 
as  an  enemy,  try  to  kill  its  appetencies  by  some  sort  of  asceti- 
cism, under  which  term  we  may  include  not  only  such  self- 
tormenting  as  we  ascribe  to  anchorites  but  the  modern  vagaries 
of  dieting  and  dosing.  Or,  if  we  adopt  the  more  wholesome 
idea  of  mens  sana  in  corpore  sano,  the  sound  mind  in  a  sound 
body,  which  is  as  good  Christian  doctrine  as  it  is  heathen,  we 
are  so  apt,  in  our  ardor  of  training  and  exercise,  to  lay  out  all 
our  spiritual  energies  on  the  body  that  by  the  time  we  get  to 
the  question  of  putting  in  the  sound  mind  there  is  hardly 
enough  mind  left  to  be  worth  perpetuating;  it  is  all  so  absorbed 
in  golfing  and  football  that  the  serious  question  rises  whether 
for  such  a  soul  eternal  existence  would  not  be  an  unendurable 
bore.  Have  we  reckoned  with  the  problem  of  ennui;  do  we 
realize  how  vital  may,  for  many,  become  the  question  whether 
after  all  life  is  worth  living?  I  sometimes  wonder  about  those 
hapless  mortals  whose  mind  is  to  them  so  little  of  a  kingdom 
that  they  have  much  ado,  by  various  inane  distractions,  to 
kill  time;  I  wonder,  if  time  hangs  so  heavy  on  their  hands,  how 
they  are  going  to  kill  eternity.  Nor  is  it  the  play  side  of  life 
alone  that  suffers;  the  work  side  too,  however  interesting  or 


INVENTORY  OF   VITAL   VALUES          339 

successful  the  work  is,  shares  the  same  unbearableness  and 
exhaustion;  the  worn-out  body  and  nerves  have  some  day  to 
cease  from  it,  just  as  the  athlete  inevitably  breaks  down;  and 
the  corrective  no  more  comes  by  stopping  work  than  the  cor- 
rective of  the  other  side  of  life  comes  by  stopping  play.  It 
goes  back,  after  all,  to  the  inner  source  whence  work  and  play 
proceed,  to  the  intrinsic  spiritual  man,  as  he  really  is  whether 
in  action  or  at  rest,  to  man  with  that  endowment  of  life  which 
answers  to  his  supreme  aspiration.  "Not  that  which  goeth  in 
at  the  mouth,"  said  our  Lord,  "defileth  a  man,  but  that  which 
cometh  out  of  the  heart";  we  may  say  the  same  thing  too  of 
that  which  upbuilds  and  makes  life  worth  living.  We  may 
get  a  partial  object-lesson  toward  this  truth  in  the  way  men 
absorb  themselves  in  art  and  learning;  and  in  the  saving  fact 
that  every  man  is  capable  of  doing  things  ideally,  and  going 
on  doing  them  in  spite  of  penury  and  sacrifice;  and  in  the  fact 
that  the  highest  work  a  man  can  do,  the  work  that  calls  out 
his  best  ideals  and  energies,  is  work  that  he  would  scorn  to 
be  paid  for  except  in  kind.  The  very  work  we  do,  the  very 
free  play  of  talent  and  genius  that  we  love,  is  perpetually  call- 
ing us  away  from  our  bodies,  what  we  shall  eat  and  drink  and 
wherewithal  we  shall  be  clothed.  But  you  see  our  errors  come 
from  assuming  that  the  body  is  on  top;  and  along  with  this, 
from  the  idea  that  we  must  die  anyhow,  that  we  must  be  sub- 
ject to  the  shoal  of  diseases  and  decrepitudes  that  are  them- 
selves merely  stages  of  dying,  and  that  we  may  as  well  accept 
the  situation  and  have  the  evil  event  over.  In  other  words, 
so  far  as  the  body  is  concerned,  we  still,  in  spite  of  our  Chris- 
tian revelation,  make  up  life  with  reference  to  death;  it  is 
bodily  death  we  are  looking  for  and  dreading,  however  we  may 
try  to  stave  it  off  by  asceticism  and  dosing,  or  meet  it  with  a 
show  of  bravado.  Our  theory  of  life  is  concerned;  we  need 
a  more  livable  theory,  one  that  is  adapted  to  work  higher 
things  than  the  things  of  the  body  and  the  world. 

Right  here  we  may  learn  some  very  suggestive  things  about 
vital  values  from  the  lives  of  those  nameless  common  men  who 
were  only  good  to  burn.  They  could  not  do  the  acute  think- 


34o  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

ing;  could  not  cipher  out  rules  of  living  by  logic;  but  they 
were  imbued  with  one  great  simple  idea  that  would  work;  they 
had  learned  to  make  up  life  not  with  reference  to  death  but 
with  reference  to  life,  life  ever  more  and  fuller.  For  them 
death  was  in  the  most  essential  sense  actually  and  literally 
abolished.  Now  when  you  come  to  think  of  it,  this  was  a 
tremendous  working  idea;  and  we  can  think  how  tremendous 
must  have  been  the  ground  swell  of  the  spirit  which  could 
raise  the  living  faith  of  common  men  to  such  a  high  level. 
They  had  to  get  at  it,  unsophisticated  minds  as  they  were,  by 
the  simplest  and  concretest  ways,  and  the  idea  had  to  grow 
from  elemental  beginnings.  From  the  first,  too,  it  had  to  es- 
tablish itself  in  the  face  of  this  universal  lot  of  death  to  which 
all  mankind  is  subject.  To  live  as  if  this  last  enemy  were  prac- 
tically killed,  and  therefore  a  negligible  quantity,  —  how  shall 
the  man  of  the  rank  and  file  learn  this?  It  was  a  spiritual 
truth,  a  truth  of  the  unseen,  and  yet  it  must  be  laid  hold  of  in 
terms  of  the  body;  the  whole  man,  not  merely  the  ethereal 
part  of  him,  must  have  the  benefit  of  it.  Well,  there  was  the 
initial  fact,  for  constant  faith  and  reference,  that  their  Lord 
when  He  rose  from  the  dead  left  an  empty  grave  and  showed 
them  a  body  that  they  could  see  and  handle;  a  miracle  if  you 
please,  a  unique  thing  whose  reality  our  sapient  scholars  are 
doubting,  but  certainly  a  miracle  placed  where  it  could  do 
most  good,  and  what  is  of  most  consequence,  having  power  as 
an  idea ;  a  whole  increasing  community  of  men  forthwith  began 
to  live  as  if  it  were  so,  That  is  the  main  point.  Then  there 
were  other  plain  ideas  accompanying  this:  this  same  risen 
Master  was  all  the  while  just  over  that  unseen  boundary,  ready 
to  receive  His  own;  and  further,  He  was  coming  again,  very 
soon,  before  they  died  perhaps,  and  the  end  of  this  world  and 
the  beginning  of  a  new  unworldly  kingdom  was  hard  at  hand. 
Do  you  say  this  was  a  false  scaffolding  for  their  thoughts? 
But  it  was  adapted  to  their  minds,  it  was  on  their  level,  per- 
haps their  lowly  conceptions  had  equal  shares  in  the  shaping 
of  it;  and  above  all,  it  was  a  working  idea  that  led  straight  to 
the  noblest,  joyfulest  living.  They  had  to  live  in  perpetual 


INVENTORY  OF   VITAL   VALVES  341 

liability  to  death  by  violence  and  torture;  but  they  leaped  ex- 
ultingly  to  meet  it,  for  that  was  the  death  that  Christ  died,  and 
with  that  death  was  especially  associated  the  power  of  His 
resurrection.  Then  meanwhile  they  had  their  spiritual  gifts, 
among  which  were  gifts  of  healing;  and  they  lived  long  in  the 
confidence  that  they  were  to  be  immune  from  deadly  poisons 
and  serpents,  and  that  the  prayer  of  faith  would  save  the  sick. 
Their  body  was  to  be  healed  and  cared  for,  by  the  power  of 
the  spirit  that  was  in  them.  Then  gradually  changes  came 
upon  this  idea;  and  we  cannot  say  whether  these  came  because 
faith  lessened  or  because  it  deepened  and  broadened,  becoming 
a  more  spiritual,  less  purely  material  thing.  The  era  of  aston- 
ishing feats  of  the  spirit  passed  just  as  soon  as  its  vital  value 
was  secured;  but  it  passed  into  something  greater  and  more 
universally  workable.  "Covet  earnestly  the  best  gifts,"  St. 
Paul  told  them;  "and  yet  show  I  unto  you  a  more  excellent 
way";  and  this,  you  remember,  was  his  occasion  of  assuring 
them  that  while  the  exceptional  feats  of  the  spirit  were  bound 
to  pass,  yet  faith  and  hope  and  love  survived,  and  that  love 
was  the  greatest  thing  in  the  world.  The  same  apostle  gloried 
in  tribulation  also,  because  that  was  the  austere  friend  which 
steered  them  through  growing  stages  of  inner  discipline  until 
the  love  of  God  was  shed  abroad  in  their  hearts.  He  found 
indeed  among  the  Corinthians  that  faith  was  not  up  to  the 
mark,  that  many  were  weak  among  them  and  many  sick; 
that  was  a  thing  that  ought  not  to  be;  their  spirits,  endowed 
with  such  gifts,  should  have  better  control  over  the  body  than 
that.  But  later  he  seemed  to  have  learned,  and  with  him 
the  church,  that  we  could  not  expect  to  go  on  ignoring  or  evad- 
ing disease  as  if  we  were  immune;  that  sickness  and  decay, 
like  tribulations  and  hardships,  were  necessary  facts  of  life, 
to  be  dealt  with  as  things  to  be  undergone  rather  than  evaded. 
If,  as  he  believed,  this  physical  body  was  as  it  were  a  womb 
in  which  a  spiritual  body  was  getting  ready  to  be  born,  and 
if  it  was  our  duty  to  be  transfigured  by  the  renewing  of  our 
minds,  yet  this  was  not  to  come  about  necessarily  by  a  pro- 
gressive release  from  bodily  ills,  but  in  spite  and  presence  of 


342  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

them;  besides  there  was  a  fighting  faith  and  beauty  of  love  in 
the  way  he  met  bodily  suffering  which  was  itself  a  triumph  of 
the  spirit.  And  so  the  spiritual  body,  by  whatever  experience, 
might  go  on  forming  itself  and  essentially  transfiguring  the 
man;  or  as  he  expressed  it,  " though  our  outward  man  perish, 
yet  is  our  inward  man  renewed  day  by  day."  In  this  truth 
it  looks  as  if  the  naive  faith  and  expectation  of  the  early  Chris- 
tians were  at  last  translated  into  their  ultimate  spiritual  value. 
The  inward  man  had  come  to  his  own;  was  asserting  a  power 
of  life  which  day  by  day  rose  superior  to  the  physical  un- 
towardness  and  progressive  decrepitude  that  were  the  natural 
accompaniments  of  the  day.  "For  this  cause  we  faint  not," 
he  said.  There  had  been  cause  for  fainting  and  doubt,  as  the 
exultant  first  disciples  saw  little  by  little  that  in  spite  of  their 
marvelous  spiritual  gifts  the  tendency  to  sickness  and  evil-hap 
still  remained;  and  while  they  were  growing  old,  and  some  of 
them  dying  off,  still  their  Lord  did  not  come  for  them.  Their 
faith  was  losing  the  support  of  its  initial  physical  wonders. 
So  it  was:  the  scaffolding  of  the  exceptional  and  astonishing 
had  to  be  gently  removed,  as  men  could  bear  it,  and  from  the 
light  of  miracle  men  must  emerge  into  the  light  of  common 
day.  But  when  the  inner  man  is  strong  and  comely  enough 
to  stand  alone,  facing  with  joy  and  courage  all  the  adverse 
winds  that  blow,  it  is  better  that  he  stand  without  scaffolding. 
This  is  only  a  little  broader  interpretation  of  the  saying,  "It 
is  expedient  for  you  that  I  go  away";  the  Christ  of  the  mar- 
velous and  immediate  response  must  go  away,  that  the  Christ 
of  the  individual  himself,  with  his  individual  initiative,  may 
have  his  chance.  If,  though  in  its  insidious  forms  death  at- 
tacks his  mortal  frame,  just  as  it  used  to  do,  if  all  the  while 
his  inward  man  rebounds  with  daily  renewal,  then  in  a  still 
truer  and  more  practical  sense  Christ  is  formed  within  him, 
the  hope  of  glory.  It  is  just  in  this  connection,  you  remember, 
that  St.  Paul  figures  our  bodily  frame  as  merely  a  temporary 
tent,  in  which  we  groan,  earnestly  desiring  to  be  clothed  upon 
with  our  house  which  is  from  heaven;  and  as  soon  as  that 
tent  is  struck,  as  if  it  had  been  a  kind  of  veil,  there  emerges 


INVENTORY  OF  VITAL   VALUES          343 

the  house  not  made  with  hands,  eternal  in  the  heavens.  You 
remember  too  how  the  language  of  dying,  the  conception  of  it 
as  extinction  or  even  as  a  crisis  in  life,  wholly  disappears  from 
the  New  Testament  vocabulary;  instead  of  it,  the  apostles 
speak  of  falling  asleep,  of  putting  off  this  tabernacle  (St. 
Peter's  word),  of  departing  and  being  with  Christ,  but  not  at 
all  of  death  as  an  enemy,  or  having  any  real  existence,  not  at 
all  as  Job  and  the  psalmists  and  prophets  spoke.  Yet  the 
thing  that  both  apostles  and  prophets  faced  remained  as  ever, 
and  its  attendant  train  of  bodily  ills  and  decay  was  still  here 
as  ever.  We  learn  a  great  deal  in  Scripture  from  the  concep- 
tions that  disappear,  extinguished  by  larger  light  and  vitality. 
That  the  conception  of  death  as  death,  and  of  disease  as  a 
thing  that  unmans  us,  should  have  died  out  of  men's  habitual 
thoughts,  is,  when  we  think  of  it,  the  strongest  possible  cor- 
roboration  of  the  coming  of  life  and  immortality  to  light. 

So  that  progressive  spiritualization  of  the  early  Christian's 
thoughts  was  like  a  perpetual  voyage  of  discovery,  in  which, 
while  in  the  course  of  time  they  were  fated  always  to  encounter 
new  views  of  truth,  new  waves  of  disclosure,  yet  always  the 
fundamental  thing  that  they  had  discovered,  the  mystery  of 
Christ  in  man,  remained  intact,  and  made  itself  good  with 
every  new  application;  it  proved  itself  an  ever  deepening  and 
broadening  vital  value,  adapted  alike  to  body  and  spirit.  It 
was  from  the  first  bestowal  of  the  Spirit,  with  its  quasi  ma- 
terial effects,  a  means  of  their  living  spontaneous,  joyful,  as 
it  were  instinctive  life,  in  which  they  were  delivered  from 
the  drag  of  reckoning  with  disease  and  death,  and  could  have 
the  full  energy  of  faith  to  lay  out  on  other  and  more  real  pur- 
poses. But  also  it  was  a  means  of  culture,  and  of  advancing 
wisdom;  it  stimulated  thought,  it  invited  men  to  explore  and 
verify  their  theory  of  life  and  apply  it  to  things  as  they  are. 
From  that  day  to  this  it  has  been  the  world's  deepest  educa- 
tion; and  yet  in  the  process  it  has  lost  no  whit  of  its  initial 
power,  even  while  it  has  gathered  power  in  its  advance  into 
the  unseen.  Now  since  those  wonderful  early  gifts  faded  from 
their  material  manifestations  into  the  light  of  common  day, 


344  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

the  culture  side  has  been  more  in  evidence;  so  that  while  men 
have  followed  its  growth  into  their  systems  of  theology  and 
ecclesiasticism  they  have  tended  more  and  more  to  ignore  its 
working  in  their  bodies  and  nerves,  and  to  give  this  latter 
phase  of  life,  the  bodily,  into  the  keeping  of  mechanical  and 
materialistic  theory,  into  the  exclusive  hands  of  surgery  and 
medicine  and  diet.  In  this  they  have  not  been  wrong;  and  in 
this  they  have  accomplished  marvelous  things;  witness,  for 
example,  how  the  one  element  of  cleanliness  and  sanitation  has 
wrought  to  uplift  and  ennoble  the  life  of  man.  But  there  has 
also  been  an  over  tendency,  by  this  very  one-sidedness,  to 
separate  our  nature  into  two  discordant  parts,  body  and  spirit, 
and  to  keep  the  phenomena  of  the  two  apart,  as  it  were  in 
water-tight  compartments  which  have  no  communication  with 
each  other.  You  know,  too,  how  unable  the  majority  of  men 
are,  with  all  their  culture,  to  think  of  two  things  at  once;  in- 
stead of  combining  the  two,  like  notes  in  a  musical  chord, 
into  a  third  harmonious  compound,  they  deny  one  in  order  to 
emphasize  the  other,  and  so  go  on  as  one-sided  as  before.  So 
men  have  suffered  the  side  with  which  the  Christ  work  began 
to  go  under  spiritual  eclipse;  they  have  surrendered  it  too 
much  to  the  exclusive  operations  of  material  nature;  they 
have  forgotten  that  the  Christ  in  them,  just  the  same  as  the 
Christ  in  history,  who  began  His  work  with  healing  diseases, 
that  this  same  Christ  in  them  intends  health,  that  His  spirit, 
just  as  truly  as  was  the  case  at  Pentecost  and  in  the  initial 
nascent  power  of  spiritual  gifts,  intends  healing  and  health. 
The  truth  is,  this  law  of  the  spirit  of  life  works,  and  ought  to 
work,  to  effect  not  only  a  universal  spiritualization  but  a  uni- 
versal incarnation;  its  saving  power  is  as  great  in  the  body  as 
in  the  mind;  the  whole  man  is  quickened  and  raised  from  the 
dead  together,  the  inner  wars  and  discordances  removed;  this 
is  the  great  truth  that  resurrection,  as  distinguished  from  sur- 
vival and  ultimate  separation  of  soul  from  body,  is  designed 
to  establish  as  the  crowning  destiny  of  life.  Now  here  in  our 
modern  days  we  have  a  most  significant  witness  of  the  surging 
of  this  forgotten  truth  to  the  front.  I  refer  to  the  rise  and 


INVENTORY  &F   VITAL   VALUES          345 

prevalence  of  Christian  Science.  What  there  is  good  in  Chris- 
tian Science,  —  and  we  cannot  deny  much  good  in  it,  —  I  re- 
gard as  the  practical  recrudescence,  the  indignant  remonstrance 
as  it  were,  of  an  inner  power  of  life  which  had  gone  too  much 
into  eclipse.  Men  had  so  let  their  Christian  energy  dissipate 
itself  into  a  kind  of  disembodied  spirituality,  which  they  heed- 
lessly divorced  from  common  bodily  life,  that  when  the  prac- 
tical break-up  of  old  theological  theories  came,  and  they  were 
unable  to  bank  on  the  real  efficacy  of  their  Puritan  concepts 
of  life  and  death,  they  were  left  with  too  slender  a  sense  of 
theories  that  would  work;  the  question  became  a  vital  one, 
What  does  our  Christianity,  the  Christianity  congealed  in 
dogmas  and  church  observances,  really  do  for  us  after  all? 
Just  here,  to  fill  the  void  for  the  rank  and  file  who  do  not 
think,  came  Christian  Science,  with  its  plea  that  the  great  con- 
trolling power  of  the  universe  is  not  matter  at  all  but  mind, 
and  what  was  more  significant  still,  its  impulse  of  faith,  if 
this  was  so,  to  apply  mind,  spirit,  confident  and  active  will,  to 
the  maladies  and  diseases  of  the  body.  And  men  found,  to 
their  exceeding  delight,  that  in  a  large  degree  this  impulse 
of  faith  worked;  they  found  that  the  power  of  the  spirit  was 
just  as  real  as  in  the  wonderful  and  early  days.  Here,  so  far 
forth,  was  a  theory  of  life  that  worked;  it  produced  facts  in- 
stead of  philosophy,  it  was  a  vital  power  in  the  incarnate  life 
of  humanity.  All  this,  you  see,  was  simply  a  return  to  the 
elemental  first  principles  of  things;  it  is  a  recrudescence  of 
St.  James's  truth  given  to  the  first  generation  of  Chris- 
tians, that  the  prayer  of  faith  will  save  the  sick.  And 
it  was  just  in  the  direction  that  medical  science  is 
longing  for;  the  doctors  no  less  than  the  saints  de- 
sire before  all  things  to  establish  among  their  patients  the  truth 
that  the  great  beneficent  power  of  nature  prefers  health,  in- 
tends health  not  disease,  and  that  untold  advantage  is  gained, 
and  incalculable  potencies  of  success,  just  so  far  as  they  can 
get  their  patients  to  cooperate  heart  and  soul  in  this  truth.  We 
can  think  too,  in  the  case  of  diseases  wherein  the  imagination 
is  on  top,  all  that  prevailing  class  of  neurotic  ailments  wherein 


346  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

the  spirit  of  modern  man  has  got  so  tangled  up  with  its  own 
miseries,  which  are  no  less  real  for  being  imagined,  —  you 
can  think  what  a  tremendous  advantage  it  is  to  give  men 
something  outside  themselves  to  think  of,  something  that  will 
make  them  forget  and  ignore  their  pretty  woes,  in  the  power 
of  a  new  impulse  toward  life  and  health,  even  though  their 
philosophy  of  life  and  health  be  vague  and  crude.  Nay,  the 
field  broadens  out  very  large.  Why  not,  in  this  intense,  nerv- 
ous, restlessly  enterprising  age,  apply  the  same  principle  to 
business,  which  in  its  way  seems  nowadays  to  have  become  a 
kind  of  disease?  In  this  realm,  too,  does  not  the  Christ  in  us 
intend  health,  joy,  the  free  play  of  love  and  faith,  confidence 
in  an  order  of  things  in  which  we  can  have  our  supreme  alle- 
giance to  a  spirit  of  life,  rather  than  to  increasing  the  abun- 
dance of  things  a  man  possesses?  Does  our  regenerate  nature 
intend  so  much  sudden  break-down  and  heart-failure  as  we 
see  among  those  whose  worldly  cares  have  so  taken  up  all  their 
thoughts  that  they  have  really  forgotten  to  live?  Do  not  they 
too  need  above  all  to  live  more  in  the  consciousness  of  a  power 
of  life  which  is  mind,  spirit,  and  whose  pulsation  of  love  and 
faith  heals  the  sordid  selfishness  and  crooked  ways  which, 
while  they  are  so  exclusively  set  on  worldly  success,  also  work 
like  a  fever  to  wear  out  our  vitality?  Yes,  we  may  learn  some- 
thing from  Christian  Science  as  a  social  symptom  and  a  re- 
crudescence of  primitive  vitalities;  we  have  too  heedlessly  let 
some  of  our  Christian  heritage  lapse  into  atrophy  and  become 
inoperative,  though  the  power  of  it  has  been  ours  from  the 
beginning.  We  have  not  less  reason  than  Christian  Science 
but  more,  to  live  the  joyful,  confident,  care-free  lives  that  we 
see  in  so  many  of  the  new  sect;  lives  in  which  the  buoyant 
and  exultant  spirit  shall  exert  its  good  effect  of  faith  on  nerves 
and  bodily  well-being,  while  also  our  very  interest  in  life  be- 
comes a  thing  not  wearing  but  energizing  and  restful.  There 
is  no  need  of  making  a  new  sect  to  discover  this;  we  have  all 
the  data  and  motive  we  need,  if  we  will  use  what  is  revealed  to 
us.  But  we  have  meanwhile  waited  for  Christian  Science  to 
point  out  one  way,  the  old  way  of  using  the  faith  it  is  in  us 


INVENTORY  OF   VITAL    VALUES  347 

to  have,  by  which  we  may  recover  from  our  torpid  one-sided- 
ness  and  be  made  whole.  That  way  is  ours  no  less  than  theirs. 
If  the  Christ  in  us  intends  life  and  health,  if  He  is  identified 
with  the  recuperative  powers  of  nature,  let  us  not  fear  to  make 
up  life  with  reference  to  fuller  and  freer  life,  not  to  death; 
with  reference  to  abounding  health,  both  of  the  spirit,  which 
is  the  controlling  element,  and  of  the  body,  which  ought  to 
be  the  controlled,  and  which  in  the  divine  intention  is  designed 
to  be  the  clean,  sacred,  beauteous  temple  of  the  spirit  of 
Christ. 

But  in  so  doing  we  cannot  afford,  in  the  arrogant  name  of 
Christian  Science  —  science  forsooth! — to  outrage  science 
itself ;  and  to  throw  away  all  the  research  and  experimentation, 
the  single-minded  devotion  to  healing  and  bodily  well-being, 
which  through  the  ages  has  so  dominated  that  high-minded 
profession  of  medicine,  which  has  so  nobly  trodden  in  the  steps 
of  the  Great  Physician.  When,  in  order  to  emphasize  the 
truth  that  God  is  spirit,  Mrs.  Eddy  proceeds  to  maintain  that 
body  is  unreal,  that  there  is  no  such  thing  as  disease,  and  no 
remedies  but  remedies  of  mind,  we  must  in  the  name  of 
common  sense  take  leave  of  her.  When  we  say  No  to  medicine 
and  surgery,  and  to  the  means  which  they  with  such  searching 
wisdom  have  devised,  we  are  saying  No  to  the  plain  testimony 
of  our  God-given  senses;  nay,  we  are  saying  No  to  our  mind, 
to  our  trained  intellect,  to  our  Christian  culture,  and  trying  to 
think  ourselves  into  a  world  just  as  unreal  and  one-sided  as 
the  one  we  are  asked  to  leave.  We  are  asked  to  outrage  our 
sense  of  fact  in  order  to  maintain  a  crude  thinker's  sense  of 
theory.  In  the  way  "Science  and  Health"  gets  at  its  interpre- 
tation of  things  one  is  reminded  of  Charles  Dudley  Warner's 
famous  distinction  between  the  two  things  out  of  which  Chris- 
tian Science  has  grown,  the  fads  of  mind-cure  and  faith-heal- 
ing: "In  the  case  of  mind-cure,  you  see,  one  need  not  have  any 
faith;  and  in  the  case  of  faith-healing  one  need  not  have  any 
mind."  Very  little  if  any  mind,  it  would  seem,  is  needed  to 
make  such  a  theory  of  life  as  Christian  Science  has  committed 
itself  to.  The  strange  phenomenon  of  such  a  crazy  phi- 


348  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

losophy,  in  our  advanced  age,  cuts  two  ways.  In  the  first  place, 
it  seems  to  be  just  an  instance  of  what  I  have  mentioned:  it 
betrays  a  mind  so  limited  that  it  cannot  think  of  two  things 
at  once,  and  so  combine  them,  a  mind  so  dazzled  with  one 
idea  that  it  cannot  see  the  other,  and  so  has  no  recourse  but 
to  deny  the  existence  of  the  other.  It  is  just  as  one-sided  to 
say  there  is  no  matter  as  to  say  that  everything  is  matter.  In 
fact,  the  lame  point  of  Christian  Science,  as  is  the  case  with 
every  philosophy,  is  in  its  denial,  its  negative;  it  is  so  taken 
with  the  Berkeleian  idea  that  all  reality  is  in  our  minds  that 
it  has  no  eyes  for  the  reality  that  is  in  matter.  You  remember 
how  sturdy  old  Dr.  Johnson  met  the  Berkeleian  idealism,  his 
theory  of  the  non-existence  of  matter,  when  it  was  first 
broached.  "I  observed,"  says  Boswell,  "that  though  we  are 
satisfied  his  doctrine  is  not  true,  it  is  impossible  to  refute  it. 
I  never  shall  forget  the  alacrity  with  which  Johnson  answered, 
striking  his  foot  with  mighty  force  against  a  large  stone,  till 
he  rebounded  from  it,  'I  refute  it  thus!  "  This  was  not  phi- 
losophy, perhaps;  but  neither  is  the  toothache;  but  it  con- 
vinces a  common  mind  of  something  very  real.  But  in  the 
second  place,  the  fact  that  this  crazy  philosophy  can  in  this 
late  day  actually  make  a  sect  of  itself  does  not  leave  the  gen- 
eral level  of  our  doctrine  unscathed;  like  the  other  and  better 
side,  this  side  also  is  a  symptom.  When  we  see  what  theories 
of  life  whole  congregations  of  otherwise  cultivated  people  can 
take  up  with,  just  on  the  strength  of  a  recrudescent  faith,  we 
wonder  what  conviction  of  truth,  what  body  of  doctrine,  they 
really  had  in  possession.  It  looks  as  if  on  the  theological  side 
their  minds  were  found  empty  and  swept  and  garnished,  and 
the  new  Christian  Science  philosophy,  entering  in,  had  not 
corrective  even  of  common  sense  to  encounter.  Is  it  not  an 
indication  of  the  poverty  of  Christian  thought  and  conviction 
into  which  too  generally  men  had  fallen? 

But  we  have  not  so  learned  Christ.  The  Christian  way  does 
not  deny  fact;  it  seeks  fact,  and  seeks  its  sanest  interpretation. 
Nor  does  it  make  up  its  theory  of  life  on  the  basis  of  evading 
pain,  or  of  seeking  an  ideal  existence  where  ills  are  eliminated. 


INVENTORY  OF  VITAL   VALUES  349 

Rather,  it  still  retains  the  sense  of  something  to  fight,  some- 
thing to  hold  as  real  and  as  an  enemy,  something  to  overcome 
by  the  power  of  life  that  is  in  us.  "Though  our  outward  man 
perish"  —  there  is  still  an  outward  man,  subject  still  to  the 
ills  of  the  flesh  —  "yet  our  inward  man  is  renewed  day  by 
day."  So  our  Christian  life  still  remains  an  arena  for  the 
seasoning  and  renewal  of  the  inner  man;  and  to  this  end  there 
is  room  for  all  our  culture,  our  wisdom,  our  science;  we  need 
not  throw  away  the  fruits  of  our  mental  powers  for  the  sake 
of  a  return  to  primitive  and  elemental  things;  for  all  things 
are  ours,  and  we  are  Christ's,  and  Christ  is  God's. 

If  then,  in  our  inventory  of  vital  values,  we  have  noted  first 
that  the  Christ  in  us  is  a  progressive  spiritualization,  we  may 
with  equal  confidence  note  secondly,  that  life  in  Him  is  a  pro- 
gressive incarnation,  a  progressive  adoption  into  the  family 
of  those  who  are  realizing  in  life  what  the  whole  creation  has 
groaned  for,  to  wit,  the  redemption  of  the  body.  And  to  this 
end  our  intellect  has  share  with  the  rest;  its  faith  is  not  merely 
instinctive  and  elemental,  requiring  the  authentication  of 
bodily  well-being,  though  this  also  is  its  right,  but  takes  into 
itself  all  the  growing  wisdom  of  the  ages.  Our  theory  keeps 
pace  in  sanity  with  our  facts.  St.  Paul's  prayer  for  men  was, 
"That  the  God  of  our  Lord  Jesus  Christ,  the  Father  of  glory, 
may  give  unto  you  the  spirit  of  wisdom  and  revelation  in  the 
knowledge  of  him:  The  eyes  of  your  understanding  being  en- 
lightened; that  ye  may  know  what  is  the  hope  of  his  calling, 
and  what  the  riches  of  the  glory  of  his  inheritance  in  the  saints, 
And  what  is  the  exceeding  greatness  of  his  power  to  us-ward 
who  believe,  according  to  the  working  of  his  mighty  power, 
Which  he  wrought  in  Christ,  when  he  raised  him  from  the 
dead."  Here  is  an  appeal  not  only  to  our  buoyant  appetency 
for  health  but  to  our  sound  and  grounded  progress  in  ideas; 
body  and  spirit  are  raised  into  fuller,  wealthier  life  together. 


350  THE  LIFE  INDEED 


III.      WHY    STAND    YE    GAZING    UP    INTO    HEAVEN? 

"Ye  men  of  Galilee,  why  stand  ye  gazing  up  into  heaven?" 
These  words,  which  seem  to  contain  a  note  of  reproach,  were 
spoken,  as  St.  Luke  says,  by  two  men  in  white  apparel,  who 
were  suddenly  perceived  to  be  standing  on  the  spot  whence  a 
moment  before  Christ  had  ascended.  They  seem  to  warn  us 
not  to  direct  our  gaze  away  off  somewhere,  straining  our  eyes 
at  an  empty  heaven  and  something  gone,  but  to  turn  and  find 
the  solution  of  things  here,  just  where  we  stand.  What  shall 
we  find,  as  we  betake  ourselves  from  this  mount  of  ascension 
to  common  life  again?  Are  these  words  for  us  the  prelude  to 
a  supreme  disillusion  and  culmination  of  deception,  or  to  a 
supreme  truth,  now  demonstrated  in  the  flesh,  and  the  cul- 
mination of  reality?  A  momentous  alternative  this,  which  we 
cannot  refuse  to  face.  This  Christ,  as  we  have  come  to  know 
Him  better,  has  satisfied  our  hearts  as  a  world  epitome,  gather- 
ing into  one  Personality  all  the  hidden  values  of  life.  If  now 
He  is  gone,  all  is  gone;  where  are  we  without  Him?  Our  al- 
ternative becomes  poignant  and  piercing:  was  all  this  struggle 
of  the  manhood  spirit  co-witnessing  with  the  divine,  stumbling 
through  the  dimness  of  the  twilight  stratum,  winning  painfully 
to  the  fulness  of  the  time,  walking  for  a  bewildered  season  in 
the  mild  presence  of  the  supreme  historic  venture,  getting  eyes 
hitherto  holden  true-sighted  enough  to  see  the  law  of  the  spirit 
of  life,  —  was  all  this,  which  we  associate  inalienably  with  the 
Christ,  —  was  this  ministry  which  was  the  solution  of  it  all, 
as  men  like  Renan  think,  for  nothing,  a  beautiful  unsubstan- 
tial episode  which  passed  and  left  no  trace;  or  rather  did  it 
reveal  the  supreme  meaning  and  power  and  beauty  of  life,  in 
the  glory  of  rounded  personality,  vanishing  only  as  stars  vanish 
before  the  sun,  vanishing  yet  also  here,  standing  unseen  in  the 
Presence  wherein,  though  unaware,  we  have  ever  been,  the 
presence  of  Him  who  only  hath  immortality,  dwelling  in  the 
light  which  no  man  can  approach  unto?  Such  is  the  tremen- 
dous alternative  pressed  upon  us  by  the  ascension,  which  ac- 


INFENrORT  OF  VITAL   7ALUES          351 

cording  as  we  receive  it  entails  upon  us  a  paralysis  of  sorrow 
or  a  permanent  vitality  of  joy.  You  remember  how  Browning 
has  described  the  sorrow  of  it: 

Who  failed  to  beat  the  breast, 
And   shriek,  and  throw   the  arras  protesting  wide, 
When  a  first  shadow  showed  the  star  addressed 
Itself  to  motion; 

and  what  consequence  he  draws,  that,  "we,  lone  and  left  silent 
through  centuries,"  are  thrown  back  into  uncertainty  again, 
our  life  still  dim  and  unsolved. 

We  shall  not  look  up,  know  ourselves  are  seen, 
Speak,  and  be  sure  that  we  again  are  heard, 
Acting  or  suffering,  have  the  disk's  serene 
Reflect  our  life,  absorb  an  earthly  flame. 

Not  so  did  it  affect  those  who  saw  it  with  their  eyes,  men 
whose  souls,  yet  unsicklied  o'er  with  the  pale  cast  of  thought, 
could  move  in  lines  of  straight  and  simple  consequence. 
"They,"  St.  Luke  says,  "worshipped  him,  and  returned  to  Jeru- 
salem with  great  joy;  and  were  continually  in  the  temple, 
praising  and  blessing  God."  If  there  was  engendered  a  sense 
of  loneness,  a  silence  of  bereavement,  through  the  centuries, 
surely  these  Galileans  who  had  the  final  sight  of  Him  were 
not  the  originators  of  it. 

No:  rather  from  that  last  mystic  event  on  the  Mount  of 
Olives  their  simple  minds  were  firmly  set  toward  the  positive, 
the  glorious  member  of  the  alternative;  and  thenceforward 
through  time  their  faith  was  an  education,  continually  en- 
larged and  enriched,  in  the  meaning  and  involvement  of  it. 
This  education  began,  like  all  their  disclosures  of  life,  at  the 
point  where  they  stood,  at  the  thing  they  had  eyes  to  see.  The 
announcement  with  which  the  two  white-robed  men  followed 
up  their  monitory  question  was,  "This  same  Jesus,  which  is 
taken  up  from  you  into  heaven,  shall  so  come  in  like  manner 
as  ye  have  seen  him  go  into  heaven."  This  is  the  most  literal 
and  visualized  prediction  that  we  have  of  the  second  coming 
of  Christ;  and  so,  whatever  else  it  says,  it  puts  into  plainest 


352  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

and  most  apprehensible  terms  the  truth  that  there  is  a  con- 
servation of  the  spiritual  energy  and  fulness  that  has  once 
come  to  earth,  that  it  is  here  not  to  be  exhibited  and  with- 
drawn but  to  stay  and  work  an  eternal  work,  not  a  memory 
only,  but  a  prophecy  and  a  living  power.  "Shall  so  come  in 
like  manner  as  ye  have  seen  him  go,"  is  the  prediction.  For 
forty  days  the  Galileans  had  been  under  a  wonderful  and 
unique  schooling,  being  prepared  to  see  Him  go.  There  were 
Peter  temperaments  among  them,  and  John  temperaments, 
and  Thomas  temperaments;  there  were  soon  to  be  added  to 
them  the  fiery  penetrative  temperaments  of  Paul  and  Apollos, 
and  the  long  line  of  those  who  must  receive  the  prediction  not 
from  actual  sight  but  from  report  and  reading  and  sense  of  the 
inner  truth  of  things.  How  did  all  these  see  Him  go?  How 
have  we  seen  Him  go?  How  then  for  us  shall  He  come  again; 
how  shall  the  conservation  and  correlation  of  spiritual  energy 
as  embodied  in  Christ  manifest  its  continued  existence?  Each 
one  saw  according  to  his  own  eyesight  and  insight;  not  more. 
But  not  one  of  those  who  remained  faithful  remained  the  man 
he  was.  In  a  week  more  a  mighty  pulsation  of  light  and  growth 
was  to  enter  into  them;  so  soon  was  the  essential  coming  again 
to  begin;  and  they  who  had  looked  upon  the  Son  of  man  were 
in  the  new  transfiguring  light  to  look  upon  new  creations  of 
faith  and  the  events  of  a  redeemed  manhood  going  on  from 
more  to  more.  They  could  not  remain  the  men  they  were; 
they  must  not.  It  befell  them,  as  they  went  on  living,  as  it 
did  in  Tennyson's  vision,  wherein  he  senses  himself  sailing 
down  a  mighty  river  toward  the  ocean,  conducted  by  maidens 
who  as  they  sailed  sang  of  what  is  wise  and  good  and  graceful, 
and  of  a  bettering  world,  and  so  accompanied  him  toward  the 
great  deep,  where  his  friend  Hallam  was. 

And  still  as  vaster  grew  the  shore 
And  roll'd  the  floods  in  grander  space, 
The   maidens   gather'd   strength   and   grace 

And  presence,  lordlier  than  before; 

And  I  myself,  who  sat  apart 
And  watch 'd  them,  wax'd  in  every  limb; 


INVENTORY  OF  VITAL   VALUES          353 


I  felt  the  thews  of  Anakim, 
The  pulses  of  a  Titan's  heart; 

As  one  would  sing  the  death  of  war, 
And  one  would  chant  the  history 
Of  that  great  race,  which  is  to  be, 

And  one  the  shaping  of  a  star; 

Until  the  forward-creeping  tides 
Began  to  foam,  and  we  to  draw 
From  deep  to  deep,  to  where  we  saw 

A  great  ship  lift  her  shining  sides. 

The  man  we  loved  was  there  on  deck, 
But  thrice  as  large  as  man  he  bent 
To  greet  us.  Up  the  side  I  went, 

And  fell  in  silence  on  his  neck. 


Nay,  some  such  conception  as  this,  of  our  growing  and  greaten- 
ing  as  the  years  go  on,  came  to  one  of  those  who  saw  Christ 
ascend  and  heard  this  prediction  of  His  coming.  St.  John, 
who  saw  most  deeply  and  intuitively,  wrote  long  afterward, 
"Beloved,  now  are  we  the  sons  of  God,  and  it  doth  not  yet 
appear  what  we  shall  be:  but  we  know  that,  when  he  shall 
appear,  we  shall  be  like  him;  for  we  shall  see  him  as  he  is." 
We  have  seen  Him,  each  one  of  us,  as  we  are;  but  with  what 
narrowness  and  dimness  of  vision,  what  trembling  timidness 
of  faith.  It  remains  for  us  and  the  world,  as  we  grow  in  like- 
ness to  Him,  to  grow  in  fitness  to  see  Him  as  He  is.  What 
matter  if  He  should  come  again  many  times  over,  if  we  could 
not  see  Him  as  He  is?  So  in  this  very  prediction' of  the  second 
coming  of  Christ,  there  seems  to  be  hinted  a  provision  for  men 
to  grow  other  and  greater,  nay  for  the  growth  of  a  world  his- 
tory, in  order  on  something  like  equal  and  therefore  recognizing 
terms,  to  meet  Him. 

I  am  not  trying  here  to  do  anything  more  than  the  Scriptures 
themselves  do  toward  dissipating  this  prophesied  return  of 
Christ  into  a  merely  spiritual  and  mystical  event.  It  was  long 
held  to  be  a  literal,  bodily  coming,  and  dates  were  set  for  it 
within  the  lifetime  of  those  who  saw  Him  go.  St.  Paul,  scholar 


354  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

as  he  was,  in  his  native  Jewish  appetency  for  a  sign, 
laid  it  at  first  vigorously  and  vividly  on  his  imagination;  and 
in  his  earliest  letter  to  the  Thessalonians  he  pictured  it  as  close 
at  hand,  with  all  its  accompaniments  of  shouting  and  Arch- 
angel's voice  and  the  trumpet  of  God  and  a  great  multitude  of 
embodied  and  disembodied  together  caught  up  to  meet  the 
Lord  in  the  air;  but  even  in  his  second  letter  to  the  same 
church  his  ideas  were  beginning  to  change,  and  he  would  post- 
pone the  great  event  a  little,  to  make  room  for  a  previous  fall- 
ing away  and  revelation  of  the  man  of  sin.  In  his  letter  to  the 
Corinthians,  while  he  still  seems  in  imagination  to  hear  the 
trumpet,  and  still  figures  the  event  spectacularly,  saying  we 
shall  not  all  sleep  but  we  shall  all  be  changed,  in  a  moment,  in 
the  twinkling  of  an  eye,  at  the  last  trump,  yet  he  no  longer 
sets  a  date,  and  his  coming  of  Christ  seems  to  be  joined  with 
a  general  resurrection.  The  prophecy,  in  fact,  as  time  goes 
on,  suffers  the  fate  of  all  prophecies:  its  sharp  outlines  gradu- 
ally dislimn,  and  its  details  conform  themselves  more  to  natural 
ongoings,  while  the  substance  and  essence  of  it  strikes  in- 
ward, becoming  a  more  spiritual  and  by  that  very  means  a 
more  real  and  vital  value.  The  fate  of  all  prophecies,  I  say, 
however  true;  if  the  fate  of  any  great  prophecy  were  other, 
the  prophecy  would  smack  too  much  of  private  interpretation, 
private  to  an  age,  or  to  a  passing  date,  or  to  a  particular 
people's  notions.  Men  had  to  learn  that  no  prophecy,  if  it 
was  to  avail  for  a  universal  humanity,  was  thus  of  private  in- 
terpretation. A  whole  heritage  of  such  prophecy,  a  whole 
stock  of  ideas  about  coming  things,  accumulated  from  the  old 
Jewish  regime,  was  in  these  early  disciples'  keeping,  and  had 
to  be  either  adjusted  to  new  conditions  or  outgrown.  One  of 
the  first  things  they  discovered  was  that  there  was  a  whole 
effete  system  of  ideas  which,  as  the  writer  to  the  Hebrews 
says,  was  ready  to  vanish  away;  it  was  waiting  for  only  one 
more  mighty  earthquake  to  tumble  down  forever.  "Whose 
voice  then  shook  the  earth,"  the  writer  says;  "but  now  hath 
promised,  saying,  Yet  once  more  I  shake  not  the  earth  only, 
but  also  heaven.  And  this  word,  Yet  once  more,  signifieth  the 


INFENTORT  OF  VITAL   VALUES  355 

removing  of  those  things  that  are  shaken,  as  of  things  that  are 
made,  that  those  things  which  cannot  be  shaken  may  remain." 
The  disciples  little  realized,  to  begin  with,  what  a  clean  sweep 
of  man-made  things,  hoary  old  traditions  and  notions,  was 
destined  to  be  made.  The  idea  of  a  coming  judgment  and 
assize,  for  instance,  was  merely  an  appendage  of  the  empire  of 
law,  wherein  every  man  was  uncertain,  without  an  external 
will  to  teach  him,  whether  his  works  were  rewardable  or  pun- 
ishable; and  even  before  the  New  Testament  times  are  over 
this  judgment  idea  has  about  as  good  as  gone  by  the  board; 
for  the  apostles  have  discovered  that  in  Christ  we  have  all  the 
data  for  judgment  we  need,  and  that  in  such  light  of  truth  not 
only  are  the  saints  to  judge  themselves  but  to  be  judges  of 
the  earth.  The  era  of  faith  and  love  is  its  own  light  and  certi- 
tude; it  justifies  and  ratifies  itself;  what  need  then  of  a  grand 
demonstration  in  the  valley  of  decision,  a  spectacular  assize? 
The  same  with  the  idea  of  a  simultaneous  and  multitudinous 
resurrection  of  the  dead;  the  sharp  lines  of  this  notion  begin 
even  in  the  apostles'  lifetime  to  fade,  and  in  fact  the  date  of 
resurrection  begins  to  be  squarely  identified  with  the  date  of 
our  committal  to  His  spirit.  The  Christian  is  viewed  more 
and  more  clearly  as  dead  to  sin  and  risen  with  Christ;  what 
occasion  then  for  a  grand  demonstration  of  resurrection,  away 
along  in  the  ages,  long  after  the  multitudes  of  risen  lives  have 
become  complete  in  Christ?  What  has  been  left  behind  that 
the  risen  life  is  ever  to  have  use  for?  In  fact,  all  this  idea 
is  the  offspring  of  the  obsolete  old  notion  of  making  up  life 
with  reference  to  inevitable  death,  as  if  some  time  everything 
were  to  end,  and  we  could  make  a  new  beginning,  if  at  all, 
only  when  the  end  is  complete,  and  then  make  it,  if  at  all, 
only  on  the  basis  of  disintegration  and  ruins,  only  by  patching 
up  and  mending  survived  fragments,  like  the  patching  up  of 
a  steel-framed  building  here  and  there  after  the  San  Francisco 
earthquake.  The  Christ  ideal,  with  its  abolition  of  death,  has 
annulled  all  that.  Mortality  is  swallowed  up  of  life;  this 
men  come  increasingly  to  realize;  hence  physical  death  be- 
comes a  negligible  quantity;  that  is  no  point  at  which  to  set 


356  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

up  our  beginning  of  life,  whether  survival  or  resurrection. 
Rather,  our  initial  point  is  the  place  where  our  faith,  our  whole 
will  and  energy  of  being,  lays  hold  of  the  new  life  force  which 
comes  in  with  the  redemption  of  the  body,  that  redemption 
after  which  all  creation  has  groaned  until  now,  and  which  the 
supreme  historic  venture  on  the  issue  of  love  and  faith  has 
once  for  all  proved  true,  valid,  an  authentic  power  of  highest 
manhood.  Redemption  is  not  an  end  but  a  beginning,  the 
great  beginning  of  life  after  which  we  set  our  dates  and  number 
our  years.  So  from  this  point  the  one  issue  is,  not  get- 
ting ready  to  die,  not  even  getting  ready  to  rise  from  the  dead, 
but  making  the  life  that  is  already  proffered  us  rich  and  full 
and  wise  and  pure,  as  a  life  obeying  the  functions  of  perma- 
nent, eternal,  ever  growing  and  greatening  elements,  which 
resolve  themselves  into  elements  of  love  and  faith.  These 
are  our  real  vitality;  these  abide  while  all  that  is  of  the  senses 
decays  and  passes;  these  gather  into  themselves  all  the  values 
and  permanent  interests  of  life.  So  with  these  and  their  in- 
volvements as  our  outfit,  we  can  disregard  the  things  that  die, 
for  in  us  they  are  already  dead.  "If  ye  then  be  risen  with 
Christ,"  one  plain  and  glorious  duty  remains;  "seek  those 
things  which  are  above,  where  Christ  sitteth  on  the  right  hand 
of  God."  Here  is  the  essential  heaven  in  the  present  world; 
here  is  resurrection  in  this  life;  the  rest,  the  conjectured  con- 
dition of  things  after  that  insignificant  crisis  of  physical  death, 
is  only  matter  for  scientific  curiosity  or  perhaps  psychic  re- 
search, but  does  not  belong  to  the  principles  and  motives  of 
things.  Nay,  as  we  go  on,  the  clean  sweep  of  crude  old  ideas 
becomes  still  more  portentous  and  momentous.  The  whole 
idea  of  making  death  a  punctuation-point,  at  which  the  punc- 
tuation and  full-stop  of  life  is  merely  a  clearing  off  of  old 
scores  by  reward  or  punishment,  the  whole  basis  of  world-made 
legislation  and  justice,  has  become  inoperative  and  obsolete, 
not  because  it  has  passed,  but  because  it  has  become  rudi- 
mentary and  as  it  were  automatic,  like  the  reflex  and  involun- 
tary operations  of  our  body;  the  abolition,  or  rather 
absorption,  of  the  whole  matter  has  been  provided  for  and 


INVENTORY  OF   VITAL   VALUES          357 

promised,  ever  since  the  Father  of  spirits  proclaimed  mercy 
greater  than  justice,  ever  since  we  have  known  of  a  God  who 
forgives  all  manner  of  iniquity  and  transgression  and  sin,  even 
while  He  would  by  no  means  acquit  or  say  that  the  guilt  of 
a  broken  law  of  being  was  not  guilt.  The  basis  of  judgment 
has  become  entirely  other.  Henceforth,  though  we  receive  as 
truly  as  ever  according  to  the  deeds  done  in  the  body,  the 
question  of  destiny  is  not  that  of  slaves  and  culprits  dreading 
justice,  nor  of  self-complacent  Pharisees  putting  in  claims  for 
reward  —  reward,  forsooth,  for  being  true  and  honest!  — but 
rather  of  how  the  glad  free  current  of  love  in  us  has  wrought 
good,  as  Christ  did,  to  the  least  and  lowest,  those  who  could 
not  pay,  those  from  whom,  because  the  love  within  us  is  au- 
thentic love,  we  never  dream  of  demanding  pay.  True,  there 
remains  the  possibility  of  a  second  death;  there  remains  the 
unforgivable  sin  against  the  Holy  Spirit,  and  what  horrors 
hang  round  that,  God  forbid  that  many  utterly  perverted  souls 
may  ever  know!  But  this  belongs  inseparably  to  the  great 
issue  of  love,  as  Christ  has  already  drawn  it  in  the  twenty-fifth 
of  Matthew;  to  the  question  whether  the  soul  will  freely  choose 
its  own  eternal  element,  the  element  of  Christ  in  us,  or,  its 
manhood  instincts  working  in  an  awful  inverse  order,  deliber- 
ately choose  the  impulses  and  bitter  malignity  of  a  fiend.  It 
is  not  the  crude  issue  of  justice  at  all;  that  is  swallowed  up  in 
redemption  and  forgiveness;  it  is  the  issue  of  grace,  the  pure 
unbought  love  of  God  working  in  and  through  us,  our  spirits 
consenting,  or  put  away  and  repudiated,  our  spirits  outraged 
and  satanized.  The  issue  is  still  beyond  conception  awful;  but 
is  there  not  still  in  this  so  gloriously  evolved  manhood,  the 
quenchless  hope,  always  fed  by  the  progressive  formation  of 
Christ  in  us,  that  where  sin  so  abounds  grace  may  much  more 
abound,  and  that  in  the  great  reckoning  God  may  find  in  our 
shrinking,  struggling  life  some  authentic  pulsation  of  His  own 
love,  which  by  its  free  working,  however  blindly,  may  enable 
us  to  inherit  the  kingdom  prepared  for  us  in  our  own  nature, 
and  perfected  in  our  accepted  representative,  Son  of  man  and 
Son  of  God? 


358  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

But  we  have  too  long  left  the  prophecy  with  which  we 
started,  the  prophecy  that  Christ  would  come  again,  that  the 
spiritual  energy  which  He  awakened  would  be  conserved  and 
correlated  with  humanity  by  an  actual  return  to  earth.  That 
prophecy,  too,  as  we  have  seen,  had  to  pass  through  modifying 
and  transforming  phases,  sometimes  hard  to  recognize  and 
identify  with  the  original  prediction;  until  by  the  time  of  the 
Second  Epistle  of  Peter  scoffers  of  the  last  days  are  beginning 
to  say,  "Where  is  the  promise  of  his  coming?  for  since  the 
fathers  fell  asleep,  all  things  continue  as  they  were  from  the 
beginning  of  the  creation."  Their  spirits  could  not  see  what 
is  the  real  glory  of  that  coming,  that  it  smites  itself  into  the 
ongoings  of  creation,  because  creation  itself  is  a  steady  prog- 
ress, an  evolution.  His  coming  does  not  abjure  or  repudiate 
the  rudimental  stages  of  creation,  does  not  treat  these  as  a 
degeneration  and  ruin,  or  even  as  evil;  rather  it  is  wrought  in 
with  them,  infusing  a  spirit  into  the  very  centre  of  them,  which 
has  limitless  powers  of  seminal  quickening  and  growth.  May 
we  not  say  then  that  Christ  in  His  second  coming  arrived  on 
earth  at  the  day  of  Pentecost,  only  a  week  after  the  return  was 
predicted?  That  partly  is  the  date  we  may  set;  that  was 
surely  the  spiritual  coming.  But  the  bodily  coming,  what  of 
that?  Ah,  here  comes  in  the  tremendous  enlargement  of  the 
idea,  the  marvelous  process  of  making  it  a  universal  and 
eternal  fact.  To  have  that  risen  body  of  Jesus  of  Nazareth 
with  us  again,  appearing  and  vanishing  at  limited  points  of 
space  and  so  feeding  idle  curiosity,  asserting  His  restored  king- 
liness  at  momentary  points  of  time,  and  so  keeping  the  promise 
material  and  literal,  —  how  would  that  fulfil  the  sublime 
promise,  what  real  use  could  a  waiting  world,  still  gazing  as 
it  were  into  heaven,  make  of  such  sporadic  and  miraculous 
coming  as  that?  Is  it  thus  that  we  have  seen  him  go;  have 
we  made  so  little  use  of  our  post-resurrection  enlightenment 
as  that?  Have  we  not  learned  to  see  in  that  ascension,  the 
whole  gracious  fulness  of  humanity,  intact  and  complete  in 
body  and  spirit,  vanishing  for  a  space,  only  in  order  to  return 
in  greater  reality  and  power,  not  as  a  spectacle  for  the  eyes 


INFENrORT  OF  VITAL   VALUES  359 

but  as  a  vitality  for  our  inmost  life?  Well  then,  if  we  have  so 
seen  Him  go,  so  in  like  manner  let  Him  return.  It  comes  back 
to  the  eyes  we  have  developed  to  see  Him  as  He  is.  But  mean- 
while, here  is  the  marvelous  truth  that  comes  more  and  more 
to  dawn  on  men  like  St.  Paul  and  St.  John,  whose  enlightened 
wisdom  enables  them  to  see  the  inside  of  things.  This  risen 
spirit  of  Christ,  victorious  over  the  death  of  the  cross,  is  hence- 
forth engaged  in  shaping  itself  a  body,  a  body  in  which  ever 
more  sublimely  to  reappear,  a  body  with  all  the  functions 
which  the  varied  energy  and  wisdom  of  man's  body  may  put 
forth  to  do  its  work  in  the  world.  And  the  material  out  of 
which  this  spirit  shapes  that  body  is  the  vast  body  of  hu- 
manity, with  one  new  life  in  its  members,  with  all  its  varieties 
and  degrees  of  endowment,  all  its  applications  of  function, 
teaching  and  working  and  healing  according  to  the  individual 
talent  and  grace,  all  its  powers  at  the  disposal  of  the  whole 
growth  of  manhood,  according  to  what  each  joint  supplieth. 
This  is  the  form  that  the  returning  person  of  Christ  comes 
more  and  more  to  take  in  men's  minds.  You  remember  how 
much  St.  Paul  says  about  the  body  of  Christ;  how  sometimes 
he  figures  it  as  a  building,  to  which  those  who  are  in  Him  con- 
tribute strength  and  beauty,  as  it  were  a  divine  artistry;  how 
oftener  he  figures  it  as  a  colossal  universal  body  of  believers, 
Christ  the  Head  sending  forth  wisdom  and  spiritual  impulse 
to  all  the  members,  or  sometimes  the  very  life  and  body  as 
a  whole,  to  which  human  heads  and  hands  and  hearts  are 
vitally  related,  as  the  branches  to  the  vine.  The  figure  is  too 
great  and  comprehensive  for  St.  Paul  to  manage  consistently; 
but  it  is  this  view  of  things  to  which  the  prediction  of  His 
coming  resolves  itself.  Nay  more:  men  come  to  see  that  Christ 
Himself  is  not  yet  complete,  but  that  He  is  being  developed 
out  of  the  varied  elements  of  manhood;  that  we  are  all  builders 
of  the  Christ  in  our  degree,  that  it  takes  a  whole  hu- 
manity to  express  Him  in  heart  and  soul,  that  we  may  even 
do  something  to  fill  up  what  is  behind  of  His  sufferings  and 
sacrifice.  It  is  a  conception  in  which  imagination  is  almost 
lost  and  baffled;  but  it  is  the  only  conception  which  makes 


360  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

the  prophecy  as  true  as  the  world  and  ages,  that  conception 
of  humanity  as  not  many  things  but  one  body,  working  har- 
moniously in  one  spirit,  and  growing  from  glory  to  transfigured 
glory,  "Till  we  all  come,  in  the  unity  of  the  faith,  and  of  the 
knowledge  of  the  Son  of  God,  unto  a  perfect  man,  unto  the 
measure  of  the  stature  of  the  fulness  of  Christ."  Can  we  say 
now,  with  this  tremendous  interpretation  in  mind,  that  Christ 
did  not  come  again,  or  ask  doubtfully  after  the  promise  of  His 
coming;  can  we  say  that  He  is  not  coming,  after  all  that  we 
have  traced  in  His  personality,  so  in  like  manner  as  we  have 
seen  Him  go?  Oh,  friends,  how  have  we  seen  Him  go,  with 
what  spirit  and  reality  and  power?  Even  as  the  power  and  vi- 
tality of  a  mighty  new  evolution,  whereby  the  final  stadium  of 
manhood  even  now,  in  that  history  wherein  a  thousand  years 
are  as  one  day,  is  being  steadily  and  majestically  traversed. 
Away  with  Renan's  sentimental  pulings  over  the  sad  departure 
of  Christ.  The  body  of  Christ  is  with  us  now,  is  us;  and  to 
each  one  of  us  it  is  given,  whether  a  vessel  to  honor  or  dishonor, 
to  be  in  our  place  and  work  a  living  member.  So  it  is,  by  this 
second  coming,  that  manhood  is  all  the  while  being  made,  ac- 
cording to  the  pattern  shown  us  in  the  mount.  Need  we  seek 
a  more  glorious  evolution  than  this,  even  though,  while  eyes 
to  see  Him  as  He  is  are  still  weak  and  astigmatic,  we  know 
not  what  we  shall  be?  Such  agnosticism  as  this  is  a  saving 
agnosticism,  for  we  know  the  potency  of  greater  things,  and 
in  our  own  unitary  body  of  manhood  we  are  using  it.  If  as 
yet  we  see  through  a  glass  darkly,  it  is  only  because  we  are 
still  in  the  turmoil  of  evolution;  the  lower  world  within  us 
still  struggles  to  obscure  the  higher;  and  as  with  St.  Paul  the 
battle  is  still  on,  though  its  issue  is  no  longer  uncertain.  We 
fight  in  undismayed  hope,  and  in  the  joy  of  greatening  light, 
for  the  boundless  powers  of  love  and  faith  are  yet  far  from 
explored  and  proved;  and  these  are  shaping  us  within. 

Where  is  one  that,  born  of  woman,  altogether  can  escape 
From  the  lower  world  within  him,  moods  of  tiger,  or  of  ape? 

Man  as  yet  is  being  made,  and  ere  the  crowning  Age  of  ages, 
Shall  not  aeon  after  aeon  pass  and  touch  him  into  shape? 


INVENTORY  OF   VITAL   VALVES  361 

All  about  him  shadow  still,  but,  while  the  races  flower  and  fade, 
Prophet-eyes  may  catch  a  glory  slowly  gaining  on  the  shade, 

Till  the  peoples  all  are  one,  and  all  their  voices  blend  in  choric 
Hallelujah  to  the  Maker  "It  is  finish'd.    Man  is  made." 

Meanwhile  a  mighty  Spirit  of  life  is  consciously  with  us  and  in 
us,  reconciling  the  world  to  Himself,  to  His  cross  and  to  the 
power  of  His  resurrection;  nor  is  His  work  destined  to  cease 
or  slacken,  but  rather  to  grow  in  wisdom  and  scope,  until  that 
other  prophecy  is  fulfilled:  "Then  cometh  the  end,  when  he 
shall  have  delivered  up  the  kingdom  to  God,  even  the  Father; 
when  he  shall  have  put  down  all  rule  and  all  authority  and 
power.  For  he  must  reign  till  he  hath  put  all  enemies  under 
his  feet.  .  .  .  And  when  all  things  shall  be  subdued  unto 
him,  then  shall  the  Son  also  himself  be  subject  unto  him  that 
put  all  things  under  him,  that  God  may  be  all  in  all."  So  it 
is,  in  this  new  era  of  light.  Already  there  is  looming  before 
illuminate  souls  a  larger  unity  still,  when  the  perfected  hu- 
manity, Head  and  members  alike,  shall  be  merged  in  Him 
from  whom  the  whole  vast  evolution  proceeds;  when  creature 
and  Creator  shall  be  no  more  twain  in  spirit  but  fully  and  har- 
moniously at  one. 

But  while  thus  this  prophecy  of  the  Christ  that  is  to  be 
enlarges  itself  to  a  vast  breadth,  until  it  becomes  the  forecast 
of  a  universal  social  evolution,  let  us  not  forget  or  think  away 
its  beginning;  let  us  not  be  of  those  who  in  order  to  contain 
one  idea  must  deny  another.  The  social  consciousness  which 
is  so  characteristic  of  our  time  tends  to  merge  the  individual 
in  the  crowd;  tends  to  rub  off  the  angles  and  outlying  peculi- 
arities of  individuality,  and  make  the  personal  soul,  who  seems 
to  himself  such  a  world  in  himself,  a  mere  bolt  or  pinion  in 
a  vast  communal  organism,  whose  mind  is  not  his,  nor  a 
centred  mind  at  all,  but  the  mind  of  some  colossal  diffusion. 
This  tendency  spreads  itself  also  over  the  unseen  future;  so 
that  this  final  unity  in  God  loses  personal  bounds  and  becomes 
a  vague  Buddhism  and  nirvana.  Not  to  be  ourselves,  not  to 
retain  what  is  unique  and  characteristic  in  us,  our  talents,  our 
acquirements,  our  individual  traits  of  being,  —  what  would  a 


362  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

survival  like  this  be  worth?  The  thought  of  this  is  a  source 
of  much  trouble  to  persons  who  love  life  as  it  is,  with  its  lights 
and  shades,  its  individual  ties  and  comrade  relations;  they 
shrink  from  it,  in  fervent  echo  of  Tennyson's  remonstrance: 

That   each,   who   seems   a   separate   whole, 
Should  move  his  rounds,  and  fusing  all 
The  skirts  of  self  again,  should  fall 

Remerging  in  the  general  Soul, 

Is  faith  as  vague  as  all  unsweet: 

Eternal  form  shall  still  divide 

The  eternal  soul  from  all  beside; 
And  I  shall  know  him  when  we  meet: 

And  we  shall  sit  at  endless  feast, 

Enjoying  each  the  other's  good: 

What  vaster  dream  can  hit  the  mood 
Of  Love  on  earth? 

Our  return  to  the  scene  from  which  we  have  started  furnishes, 
I  think,  the  wholesome  corrective  of  this  vague  doubt.  "In 
like  manner  as  ye  have  seen  Him  go,"  -  how,  we  must  ask 
again,  have  we  seen  Him  go?  As  a  mysterious  Being  indeed, 
whose  strange  physical  nature  we  had  gradually  learned  to 
dissociate  from  our  body  of  clay;  but  still,  when  He  vanished 
into  light  and  cloud,  He  vanished  as  a  body,  as  a  glorified 
organism,  with  its  functions  and  individual  traits  all  intact; 
nay,  going  from  us  as  the  one  perfectly  evolved  human  Per- 
sonality the  world  ever  saw.  In  Him  we  have  seen  individu- 
ality complete  and  finished;  it  is  the  social  Christ,  the  diffused 
Christ,  whose  evolution  still  waits  and  grows.  And  when,  a 
few  months  or  years  later,  He  stood  again  in  light  beyond 
noonday,  to  answer  the  question  of  Saul  of  Tarsus,  "Who  art 
thou,  Lord?"  so  far  from  being  remerged  into  the  diffused  love 
that  fills  the  universe,  He  still  said,  "I  am  Jesus  of  Nazareth, 
whom  thou  persecutest."  In  other  words,  the  resurrection 
whose  power  we  aspire  to  know,  if  not  a  resurrection  of  the 
flesh,  is  nevertheless  revealed  to  us  as  the  resurrection  of  the 
body,  a  true  and  authentic  body,  with  all  that  bodily  organism 
essentially  implies;  that  is  what  distinguishes  His  going  out 


INVENTORY  OF  VITAL   VALUES          363 

of  life  from  mere  spiritual  survival;  that  is  just  what  He  be- 
gan to  teach  us  by  His  transfiguration,  referring  us  to  the 
resurrection  for  the  meaning  of  it,  referring  us  to  this  rather 
than  to  the  resuscitation  of  Lazarus.  That  is  the  grand  new 
truth  impressed  upon  us  by  His  uprise  from  the  dead.  There 
is  a  natural  body,  a  physical  body  as  St.  Paul  calls  it,  the  or- 
ganism of  the  natural  life,  and  it  dies;  there  is  also  a  spiritual 
body,  the  organism  of  a  larger  and  diviner  life,  and  even  though 
it  freely  consents  to  death,  it  lives;  lives  not  by  killing  the 
physical  body  but  by  redeeming  it,  buying  it  back  as  it  were 
from  its  pains  and  bondages  and  fitting  it  for  a  purer  inheri- 
tance. Just  as  within  the  blinded  eye  of  Milton  there  was  an 
inner  power  of  sight;  just  as  within  the  deadened  ear  of 
Beethoven  there  was  the  power  to  hear  and  create  symphonies, 
so  though  our  whole  outward  man  perish  the  real  man,  the  in- 
ward man,  is  not  yielding  to  death,  but  may  be  renewed  day 
by  day.  Not  an  abstruse  or  unreasonable  idea  this:  that  the 
most  real  and  characterizing  body  of  ours  is  not  our  flesh  and 
nerves  but  inside  our  flesh  and  nerves,  transfiguring  us  by  the 
renewal  of  our  mind,  and  waiting  only  to  step  some  day  out  of 
its  temporary  tent,  its  outworn  placenta,  and  be  born  as  the  one 
adequate  organism  of  our  true  life,  a  house  not  made  with 
hands.  In  such  a  revelation  death  is  in  all  literalness 
abolished;  its  truer  name  is  birth. 

Now  if  this  is  so,  here  is  opened  a  field  not  only  for  the 
discoveries  of  religion,  but  for  the  research  of  open-eyed,  open- 
minded,  liberal  science.  We  have  got  indeed  beyond  the  realm 
of  the  tissues,  but  not  beyond  the  realm  of  the  body;  we  are 
still  legitimately  in  the  field  of  an  enlarged  and  fair-minded 
biology.  We  are  at  least  in  an  interpretation  of  life  to  which, 
if  science  cannot  yet  say  Yea,  it  certainly  cannot  say  Nay.  It 
has  tried,  arrogantly  enough,  to  say  Nay,  and  to  pin  the  body 
and  spirit  alike  down  to  matter;  but  all  its  narrowing  asser- 
tions, as  time  went  on,  have  suffered  confusion  and  shipwreck. 
What  is  matter?  it  has  asked;  and  by  the  time  it  had  got 
matter  all  sweetly  reduced  to  little  balls  or  polyhedra  called 
atoms,  out  of  which  it  could  build  everything  we  see,  along 


364  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

came  radium  and  strange  electric  ions  of  force,  which  circu- 
lated freely  through  the  minutest  of  their  atoms,  as  we  roam 
about  in  the  world;  nay,  men  are  beginning  to  wonder  if  an 
atom  of  hydrogen  may  not  be  a  completely  furnished  world  in 
itself.  Countless  energies  there  are,  with  all  the  marks  of 
design  and  intelligence,  and  with  strange  potencies  to  mould 
matter,  which  yet  can  go  freely  through  the  densest  matter, 
as  the  risen  body  of  Jesus  is  represented  to  have  stood  sud- 
denly in  the  midst,  though  the  doors  were  shut.  Men  are  all 
at  sea  about  matter  itself;  and  are  in  doubt  whether  they  ought 
to  say  substance  at  all,  whether  it  is  not  all  reducible  to  energy. 
The  whole  universe  down  to  its  minutest  speck,  seems  alive; 
and  every  atom  seems  to  have  in  it  the  organic  completeness 
of  the  whole.  Where  does  life  begin  or  end;  what  does  it 
mean;  what  smallest  or  greatest  body  is  not  furnished  with  it? 
Is  it  electricity;  is  it  light;  is  it  blind  and  fortuitous,  or  is  it 
intelligence?  And  if,  as  we  know  life,  it  is  endowed  with  con- 
sciousness and  will,  what  smallest  speck  of  protoplasm  is  not 
endowed  with  its  due  degree  of  individuality,  of  consciousness 
and  will?  Surely,  in  the  light  of  such  unanswerable  questions, 
which  are  only  specimens  from  a  limitless  multitude,  science 
can  no  longer  say  No  to  the  idea  of  a  body  which,  let  us  say, 
may  have  such  relation  to  a  luminiferous  ether,  which  exists, 
though  no  man  can  measure  it,  as  our  natural  body  has  to  the 
air.  I  do  not  say  this  is  so.  But  that  there  is  a  spiritual  body, 
to  which  space  and  time  are  no  longer  a  bridle  and  bondage, 
is  the  tremendous  idea  to  which,  through  the  powers  and  de- 
mands of  the  spirit,  the  Scripture  squarely  leads  us;  and 
science,  in  spite  of  itself,  is  forced  in  the  same  direction.  If 
this  is  so,  then  science  and  Scripture  alike,  have  room  for  their 
evolution,  their  growth  of  life  out  of  dying  matter  into  the  ful- 
ness of  its  promise.  Death  is  not  death;  it  is  change  and  tran- 
sition. Nor  does  it  have  to  be  transition  into  a  far-off  land, 
or  to  an  unknowable  perhaps.  The  other  world  may,  after 
all,  be  within  our  world,  as  the  spiritual  body  is  already  within 
our  body;  complete  and  organized,  like  the  new  Jerusalem 
getting  ready  to  come  from  God  out  of  heaven;  we  cannot, 


INVENTORY  OF   VITAL   VALVES  365 

even  on  scientific  grounds,  say  No  to  this.  Who  can  say  that 
Cardinal  Newman's  picture  is  not  literally  and  factually  true: 
"And  yet,  in  spite  of  this  universal  world  which  we  see,  there 
is  another  world,  quite  as  far-spreading,  quite  as  close  to  us, 
and  more  wonderful;  another  world  all  around  us,  though  we 
see  it  not,  and  more  wonderful  than  the  world  we  see,  for  this 
reason  if  for  no  other,  that  we  do  not  see  it.  All  around  us 
are  numberless  objects,  coming  and  going,  watching,  working 
or  waiting,  which  we  see  not:  this  is  that  other  world,  which 
the  eyes  reach  not  unto,  but  faith  only." 

Faith  only;  but  faith  is  no  bar  to  knowledge,  rather  a 
promoter  of  it;  no  imaginative  dream,  or  denial  of  what  we 
see,  rather  the  endowment  of  eyes  that  see  more  deeply,  and 
the  spur  to  research  and  realization;  faith  is  a  vitality,  a  ven- 
ture, an  initiative  energy,  a  living  as  if  this  were  so.  What 
has  come  of  such  faith  when  it  has  its  perfect  work,  working 
by  love  and  purifying  the  heart,  our  whole  course  of  study  has 
shown  us,  with  its  supreme  historic  venture,  unfolding  to  us 
the  Life  Indeed.  And  the  privilege  of  exploring  its  resources, 
as  it  deepens  and  broadens,  is  ours  forever;  it  lures  us  on,  from 
every  lowly  spot  whereon  we  stand,  to  life  more  and  fuller, 
until  by  its  vital  energy  we 

reach  the  ultimate,  angels'  law, 

Indulging  every  instinct  of  the  soul 

There  where  law,  life,  joy,  impulse  are  one  thing! 

So  now  we  have  traversed  our  course  of  study,  and  reached 
the  supreme  point  where  the  Life  Indeed,  having  established 
its  law  and  its  principle  of  growth  and  continuance,  having 
also  filled  and  ennobled  this  earthly  existence,  is  ready  for, 
nay  has  already  essentially  made,  its  transition  to  a  higher 
and  larger  sphere  of  being.  A  manhood  evolution  passing  won- 
derful it  is,  that  we  have  reviewed,  as  simple  and  elemental  as 
it  is  far-reaching  and  complex.  What  now,  in  one  deepest  word, 
does  it  all  mean? 

One  great  idea  I  have  approached  several  times,  several  times 
seen  it  standing  large  and  majestic  in  my  path,  and  yet  have 


366  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

felt  an  invincible  awe  about  exploring  it  and  as  it  were  pro- 
nouncing verdict  upon  it,  until  more  testimony  was  in,  more 
data  for  coordinating  its  elements  with  our  general  evolu- 
tionary view.  There  seemed  to  be  in  it  something  very  real 
and  very  fundamental,  which  when  the  fitting  moment  came 
we  must  not  miss  or  ignore;  and  yet  somehow  my  eyes  were 
holden.  And  now  that  we  reach  the  summit,  and  have  a  whole 
ordered  course  to  look  back  upon,  that  idea  seems  all  at  once 
to  stand  out  clear  and  plain,  as  the  colossal  key  to  the  entire 
marvelous  history.  It  is  the  great  living  evolving  truth  of 
atonement;  let  us  pronounce  the  name  according  to  its  simple 
and  winsome  English  derivation,  at-one-ment.  We  have  trav- 
ersed the  inner  history  of  a  manhood  so  evolved  by  the  power 
of  the  spirit  of  life  as  to  be  fully  and  finally  at  one  with  the 
creative  spirit  that  has  wrought  upon  and  within  it. 

For  many  years  thinkers,  you  and  I  with  the  rest,  have  been 
baffled  by  the  magnitude  of  this  idea  of  atonement.  It  would 
not  let  itself  be  cramped  into  our  narrow  and  crude  definitions. 
The  truth  of  it,  in  some  large  sense,  we  did  not  doubt;  but  to 
define  a  thing  is  to  limit  it;  and  out  of  every  such  limitation 
arose  a  feeling  of  remonstrance,  the  sense  of  what  atonement 
is  not,  or  at  best  of  what  it  is  only  in  part.  It  is  not  the  ap- 
peasing of  an  enraged  God;  it  is  not,  in  the  grotesque 
old  mediaeval  idea,  the  paying  off  of  the  devil  for  the  souls  that 
have  become  his  due;  nor  the  liquidation  of  our  huge  debt  of 
law  in  a  lump  sum;  of  these  negations  we  are  very  sure.  Nor, 
true  as  vicarious  suffering  is  of  the  noblest  manhood,  can  we 
quite  satisfy  ourselves  with  the  idea  of  one  of  our  race  being 
substituted  for  the  rest,  as  if  then  the  rest  had  nothing  further 
to  do  but  contemplate  and  rejoice;  nor  any  more,  mighty  as 
is  the  grip  of  Christ's  influence  upon  us,  does  it  exhaust  itself 
in  moral  influence;  for  still  the  question  is  open,  influence  to 
do  or  be  what?  Men  have,  I  am  inclined  to  think,  over-empha- 
sized the  duty  of  sheer  sacrifice  for  its  own  sake;  they  have 
sometimes  made  it  a  kind  of  fetish;  as  if  there  were  any  more 
intrinsic  virtue  in  giving  up  everything  without  a  motive  than 


INVENTORY  OF   VITAL   VALUES  367 

there  is  in  strongly  and  wisely  subduing  everything.  But  not 
to  multiply  untenable  or  partial  aspects,  there  is  about  all  these 
a  note  of  the  artificial,  as  if  atonement  were  a  made  product, 
not  to  say  an  ingenious  fiction,  instead  of  something  elemental 
and  intrinsic  in  manhood.  And  perhaps  the  most  deeply 
doubted  of  all,  saving  as  are  its  effects  on  this  score,  is  the  idea 
that  atonement  is  an  after-thought  and  makeshift;  as  if  in 
order  that  it  be  brought  about  at  all  man  must  first  have  fallen 
and  become  a  ruined  nature,  and  as  if  therefore  atonement 
were  not  really  a  creative  thing,  an  at-one-ment  with  God  from 
the  beginning,  but  essentially  a  colossal  piece  of  mending  and 
cobbler  work.  We  do  not  like  to  make  it  a  thing  so  casual  and 
adventitious;  what  becomes  thus  of  the  Lamb  slain  from  the 
foundation  of  the  world?  We  cannot  rest  in  its  being  only  as 
large  as  degeneration;  we  want  it  to  be  as  large  as  the  mighty 
evolution  itself,  an  at-one-ment  that  is  vital  and  valid  for  sin- 
less as  well  as  sinful  manhood,  and  as  such  not  an  artificial  but 
self-illuminating  and  self-evidencing  thing. 

Is  such  a  conception  of  atonement  obtainable?  I  think  we 
come  nearer  to  it  by  the  line  of  thought  we  have  been  following 
than  in  any  other  way;  though  in  trying  to  sketch  it  I  warn 
you  I  am  not  the  author  of  it;  I  lay  it  all,  with  its  evolutionary 
assumptions^  to  the  Bible.  It  rests  with  an  enlarged  science, 
perhaps,  to  say  whether  it  is  possible  or  impossible,  or  to  defer 
judgment  until  we  know  something  about  our  world;  at  any 
rate  it  is  abysmally  deep  and  it  is  eminently  consistent  with 
itself,  as  it  were  a  grand  poetic  justice. 

Its  basis  is  a  simple  naive  object-lesson  pursued  and  re- 
vealed through  centuries.  It  begins  with  the  tacit  assumption 
that  man,  when  God  breathed  into  his  nostrils  the  breath  of 
life  and  he  became  a  living  soul,  was  not  made  for  death,  as 
death  has  come  to  be  his  lot;  that  is,  that  there  was  in  his 
frame  and  flesh  no  intrinsic  necessity  of  passing  into  a  higher 
state  disembodied  and  by  the  way  of  disease  or  violence  or 
decrepitude,  but  perhaps  by  some  such  way  as  we  see  adum- 
brated on  the  mount  of  transfiguration  and  later  on  the  Mount 


368  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

of  Olives  where  Christ  disappeared  from  our  senses.  If  man 
had  remained  at  one  with  God  in  childlike  dependence  and  un- 
questioning obedience  and  sinlessness,  that  way  was  open  to 
him,  a  kind  of  melting  naturally  from  the  sensualized  form 
of  being  to  the  ether ealized.  But  man  chose  rather  to  be  at 
one  with  God  in  a  sense  which,  though  it  entailed  grave  conse- 
quences, was  really  higher  and  more  penetrative  of  the  God 
nature;  he  chose  to  be  as  gods,  knowing  good  and  evil,  that  is, 
he  chose  knowledge  and  initiative  enterprise  and  power  to  sub- 
due the  earth;  and  in  so  doing  he  virtually  chose  what  we  call 
death,  that  is,  the  other  and  more  painful  way  of  exit  from  this 
stage  of  being.  "In  the  day  that  thou  eatest  of  it  thou  shalt 
surely  die,"  had  been  his  warning;  but  in  spite  of  this  there 
was  in  him  the  overweening  impulse  to  stronger,  less  sweetly 
childlike  things,  and  his  spirit  dared,  and  his  eyes  were  opened, 
and  he  fell  —  upward.  At  the  same  time  he  put  himself  at 
disadvantage  even  with  the  animals  from  which  he  had  sprung; 
for  their  death,  though  natural  and  inevitable,  has  not  the 
shrinking  horror  and  dread  about  it  that  man's  has;  they,  in 
their  instinctive  submission,  beat  him  in  passing  out  of  life. 
There  are  still  left  us  landmarks  in  the  object-lesson  to  show 
what  might  have  been:  Enoch,  walking  in  utter  childlike  de- 
pendence with  God,  "was  not,  for  God  took  him";  Moses,  in 
his  great  meekness  of  legal  order  and  wise  leadership,  passed 
in  his  Creator's  arms;  Elijah,  in  his  single-minded  prophetic 
zeal,  fiery  like  his  nature,  passed  in  fire  and  flame  to  another 
stage  of  being.  Highest  of  all,  when,  a  week  after  He  had 
announced  His  Messiahship,  our  Lord  stood  on  the  mount  of 
transfiguration,  and  these  exceptional  men  stood  with  Him,  He 
had  the  offer  of  just  such  an  exit;  it  seems  to  have  been  the  nat- 
ural evolution  of  perfect  sinlessness.  Does  it  not  seem  to  tell  us 
that  the  whole  race  might  have  gone  that  way,  entering  by  a 
painless  metamorphosis  on  its  prepared  heritage,  if  it  had  not 
chosen  the  way  of  initiative  wisdom  and  pain  and  death?  Nay, 
this  object-lesson  seems  to  show,  that  sin  is  no  more  an  ele- 
mental necessity  of  manhood  than  of  the  animals:  the  spirit- 


INVENTORY  OF  VITAL   VALUES          369 

ual  instinct,  so  to  say,  is  wholesome  and  sound.  But  about 
all  these  exceptional  lives  with  their  manner  of  passing,  nay,  we 
dare  to  say  even  about  the  life  of  Jesus  up  to  this  point,  we 
get  a  sense  of  limitation;  life's  deepest  resources  are  not  all 
embodied  there;  there  is  still  about  them  a  kind  of  passiveness, 
supineness,  lack  of  individual  venture,  which  in  spite  of  its 
sinless  purity  leaves  some  higher  reach  of  manhood  yet  to  be 
revealed.  So  there  on  the  mountain  these  hitherto  highest  rep- 
resentatives of  humanity  talk  about  still  another  exit  from  life, 
which  Jesus,  strong  in  His  sense  and  duty  of  Messiahship, 
chooses  instead  of  the  easy  way  that  here  is  offered.  There  is 
still  another  way,  essential  to  the  highest  manhood  spirit,  of 
being  at  one  with  the  Father  of  spirits,  a  final  depth  and  height 
in  which,  when  it  is  complete,  both  God  and  man  shall  be  re- 
vealed as  they  most  truly  are.  What  is  it,  what  could  be  more 
than  fully  evolved  innocence  and  sinlessness? 

God  is  love,  says  the  Bible's  deepest  and  ripest  definition  of 
Him.  The  problem  of  being  at  one  with  Him,  then,  is  the 
problem  of  being  at  one  with  love,  in  all  the  involvements  that 
life  has  created  for  it.  It  goes  beyond  passive  innocence  into 
active,  holy,  vital  work  and  sacrifice,  not  the  sheer  blind  sacri- 
fice of  abnegation,  but  the  vigorous,  voluntary,  fruitful  sacri- 
fice, of  effecting  a  union  of  human  hearts  and  human  lives  in 
one  spirit  of  love.  It  goes  beyond  the  shrewdness  and  studied 
order  of  wisdom,  of  which  the  world  is  full,  committing  itself 
fearlessly,  patiently,  hopefully  to  activities  which  are  the  su- 
preme unwisdom  of  men,  but  which  prove  through  time  to  be 
the  far-reaching  wisdom  and  power  of  God.  How  far  and  how 
deep  it  goes  we  have  Gethsemane  with  its  bitter  cup,  we  have 
the  cross  with  its  shame  and  torture,  we  have  the  awful  realiza- 
tion of  aloneness,  of  separation  at  once  from  God  and  manhood, 
to  tell  us.  And  it  goes  on,  as  we  see,  not  by  the  way  of  revolu- 
tion or  rebellion,  but  by  the  way  of  greater  obedience,  obedi- 
ence even  to  the  death  of  the  cross.  But  it  is  the  death  of 
death;  and  from  the  grave  which  so  long  ago  man  chose  rises 
a  new  life,  which  no  death  can  grasp  or  hold,  a  life  henceforth 


370  THE  LIFE  INDEED 

clear  and  available,  on  the  same  terms,  to  a  whole  renewed  hu- 
manity. Is  not  this  the'  self-illuminating  definition  that  we 
have  sought,  a  definition  that  no  longer  limits  or  makes  its 
way  by  ingenuity?  This  is  the  Life  Indeed,  the  supreme 
atonement,  the  fully  revealed  majesty  and  glory  of  being  at 
one  with  God. 


THIS  BOOK  IS  DUE  ON  THE  LAST  DATE 
STAMPED  BELOW 


AN  INITIAL  FINE  OF  25  CENTS 

WILL  BE  ASSESSED  FOR  FAILURE  TO  RETURN 
THIS  BOOK  ON  THE  DATE  DUE.  THE  PENALTY 
WILL  INCREASE  TO  SO  CENTS  ON  THE  FOURTH 
DAY  AND  TO  $1.OO  ON  THE  SEVENTH  DAY 
OVERDUE. 


fl™ 


1943 


H 


LD21-100m-7,'39(402s) 


YC  30026" 


£3.5  J  62 


-5 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 


